1738900 - When saving an email as txt file, the subject is included twice

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Q]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:93.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/93.0

Steps to reproduce:

I save an email as txt file in version 91.2.1 (32 bit).

Actual results:

The subject is included twice.

Example:

Hello World
Subject:
Hello World
...

Expected results:

The subject should be included once, as in the previous versions.

Example:

Subject:
Hello World
...

Comment 1

[Q]

Hello Bugzillers,

no reaction for three months - is it so sophisticated to remove the extra saving of the subject? It is extra work for me to delete it every time...

Best,
Q

Comment 2

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

How about some concrete steps to reproduce?

• I selected an email from my Inbox
• Right-clicked on it and selected the "Save As" context menu item
• When the dialog window opened, I changed the .eml extension to a .txt extension and selected "Save"
• Then I opened the saved message in my Text Editor and have this:

" Re: Thunderbird 91.6.0 rc test on Windows 10.
Subject:
Re: Thunderbird 91.6.0 rc test on Windows 10."

Is that how you saved the email and your issue?

Comment 3

[Q]

Exactly. I tend to save emails in text files quite often.
Until the day I opened this ticket the text file would have started with

"Subject:
Re: Thunderbird 91.6.0 rc test on Windows 10."

I don't know why the subject is written twice now and I see a nuisance rather than a use in it, so I would prefer the old status.

Comment 4

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

• I tested with the previous version 78.14.0.
• Saved a message as a .txt file.
• Opened it in my Text Editor and had an empty Line 1 with a blinking cursor.
• Tested again with version 91.5.0 and had the blinking cursor before the "Re: Thunderbird 91.6.0 rc test on Windows 10." on Line 1.

Appears to be a Defect to me.

Comment 5

[Q]

OK, so what is happening?

Comment 6

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: Email saved as text (TB91.6.2): Thunderbird rocks! - Jane Doe ([e-mail]) - 2021-12-12 1223.txt

Actual result in 91.6.2 (64-bit), Win10.

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Ben, happen to know where this lives?
The resulting text output is really quite odd (see comment 6).

• Leading space and double subject
• Line breaks after each header, does that serve a purpose? Would appear much more readable to me without the newlines...

(In reply to Q from comment #5)

OK, so what is happening?

Thank you for reporting this usability issue, Q. Appreciate that it's annoying for your use case.
But many bugs and RFEs on record which are more relevant and experienced by more users than this one.

is it so sophisticated to remove the extra saving of the subject?

You can try :-) Finding the right spot is an art. After found, maybe easy.

Comment 8

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

As Walt has painstakingly analysed, this has regressed somewhere between 78.14 to 91.2.

Q (reporter), if you want to help, you could try to find the exact version / changeset where this has regressed. The code changes of that changeset would contain the right spot or hint how to fix this.
https://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/quickstart.html
Mozregression allows narrowing down by semi-automated testing of several versions where you'd check your steps if the bug occurs or not.

Comment 9

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

I didn't even know that this is possible, that we can save emails as plaintext. I only knew about .eml and HTML.

I would guess is what happens is that we generate HTML internally, and then down-convert that HTML to plaintext. The headers are an HTML table, and the plaintext converter cannot output tables and thus uses newlines after each table cell.

I would concur that this bug is very low priority. I'd even mark this WONTFIX. You get the email as plaintext, so the functionality works. I would guess that very few people use this, so it doesn't need to be perfect.

You have 3 options to work around this:

• Manually fix up the newlines with a text editor.
• Write a little script that fixes the format in the way you like
• Save as HTML, and then use another program to convert to plaintext, in a way that pleases you more.

Comment 10

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

I think another option would be to use File > Print and save as a PDF, unless they have to save as a text file for some reason.

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Q, more information is needed from you.