Open Bug 1717221 Opened 4 years ago Updated 1 year ago

Allow editing the "Content-Type" header

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Untriaged
Type:
enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
UNCONFIRMED

People

(Reporter: mozilla, Unassigned)

Details

It would be nice if Thunderbird allowed (either via an add-on API, or via prefs, or via the UI) to adjust the Content-Type header. Specifically, to allow appending something like "; markup=markdown".

Context: There exists mail software out there which understands that messages "Content-Type: text/plain; markup=markdown" mean that the message body is formatted using Markdown, and can be rendered as such. One such software is DFeed ( https://github.com/cybershadow/DFeed , running on https://forum.dlang.org/ ), which I maintain.

DFeed allows authoring posts in Markdown, and denotes such posts using "markup=markdown" as above. When it sees a message with "markup=markdown", it renders the body using a Markdown preprocessor. So far so good.

The problem occurs when other users attempt to take advantage of this feature, but wish to author their messages in Thunderbird. Currently, such users have no recourse on adding the "markup=markdown" to the "Content-Type" header, so that DFeed (and other software implementing "markup=markdown") renders it as Markdown.

Although Thunderbird provides users the capability of adding custom headers to messages, there is no way that I found to alter the "Content-Type" header to append "; markup=markdown". Not via the GUI, nor prefs, nor (as far as I can see) via an extension.

This seems like an accidental omission which did not have a use case until now.

So, this issue is a request to add this capability in some way to Thunderbird.

Some ways in which it could be done:

  • A way to set a custom Content-Type in the GUI.

  • A pref for a string to be appended to the Content-Type header, such as mail.identity.idN.headers.

  • An add-on API which allows add-ons to customize the Content-Type header. This may even allow creating an extension specifically for the purpose in aiding users in composing messages using Markdown.

Related discussion in the DFeed issue:
https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/issues/129

I totally second this! Markdown is ubiquitous and extensions should be able to add attributes concerning it.

Yes, please, this is very important. Only with this it makes sense to use markdown in the first place.
I use Render Markdown Messages (for viewing/reading e-mails) together with Markdown Here Revival (for writing e-mails), and the strange situation is that they are not rendered automatically when viewing the already sent markdown e-mails. I could enable Markdown rendering For all plain text messages, but I noticed that this distorts some e-mails that are not using markdown at all. Hence, adding "; markup=markdown" (or whatever the standard is/should be) would make so much sense. The messages should stay "text/plain", since this is what markdown was made for: to remain readable as plain text...

As a note: Mozilla would be wise to integrate the mentioned Add-Ons into Thunderbird and make markdown a native feature!

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