173918 - wrapping of quoted flowed (f=f) lines disobeys limit for chars per line

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[René Stach]

Mozilla 1.0.1, wrap plain text messages at 66 characters, format flowed on

I write a message like this:
No. of chars:
12345678901 ........ 66

---Message---
Hello, my name is Rene
and I am writing a 
message using the 
Mozilla mail composer
---Message---

That is how the message is composed and that is the way it is sent out and saved in my Sent folder. I go to the sent folder and press 'Reply' to reply to my own message. Now my mail appears quoted like this

No. of chars:
12345678901 ........ 66

---Message after quoting---
> Hello, my name is Rene and
> I am writing a message 
> using the  Mozilla mail 
> composer
---Message after quoting---

You see that Mozilla has somehow re-wrapped my original posting. Line 1 is extended by a short word of line 2 and so on. You can quickly see the problem when writing very long mails. The original mail has 150 lines. After you have quoted it it has only 145 lines.

This behaviour is not very disturbing as there are no manual line breaks in the message and we can assume that the message author does not mind where the line breaks exactly are. Nonetheless, Mozilla is editing the original posting. That must not happen.

Steps how to reproduce:
 - Set "wrap plain text message after 66 chars"
 - Compose a long message
 - Send it away
 - Go to the "Sent"-folder
 - Reply to your own message
 - Sompare the quoted text to the original message
 - See that Mozilla rewrapped the original message
   disobeying the 66-chars-limit

Possible solution: Either turn this automatic rewrapping off (best solution) or set the chars-limit for automatic re-wrapping to "chars-limit + number of quotation marks added (e.g. space + >)"


René

Comment 1

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

Reporter, please attach the mails in question to this bug (mbox file).

pi

Comment 2

[René Stach]

Attachment: Testcase containing 2 news postings: Original posting and reply

One is the original posting, the other one is a reply (full quote). The quoting
is copied and pasted into it.

First you can see, that my last paragraph in the first posting is 7 lines long.
After quoting it, it is only 6 lines long. 

The problem disobeying the char limit can then be seen when copying the quote
and pasting it in again. Many lines a wrapped (of course as "> " was added) but
some lines are wrapped in a way that 3 words are wrapped to the next line (one
would be enough).

I hope you get the point now. To say it in one sentence: Mozilla rewrapped text
when quoting. That must not happen.

Comment 3

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

Thanks, let me see if we can sort things out. Your are using format flawed.
Hence your own paragraphs are treated as on long line basically. When you do
reply the lines are wrapped to look nicely who do not want format flawed (for
good reasons;-), on the other side there are spaces to concatenate left, for
those who want. So the rewrapping ist not really rewrapping, but a feature of
f=f. As you say, if you enter hard line breaks, this won't happen.

So what remains is your observation that the lines (now quoted) are longer than
66 characters. But note that the line length is for new text and not for quotes.

pi

Comment 4

[René Stach]

Ok, nonetheless text written f=f contains marks where to wrap the lines as f=f 
is a newline char followed by a space IIRC. I don't like that Mozilla 
disregards f=f linebreaks and I furthermore don't like that Mozilla disregards 
my char limit while disregarding the linebreaks. 

If you wite some text using f=f you see where the lines are broken and exactly 
that way the messages are displayed in any client that has no f=f. If any of 
these clients replies to that message the line breaks are put at the same 
position they have ben before. Mozilla wants to be a nice client and rewraps 
the original posting. As long as the content is the only important thing in 
this message this might be ok, but when formatting is important as well (using 
indents) Mizilla is about to botch the format. There is no good reason why 
Mozilla should reformat any text when quoting and there is no good reason why 
mozilla should furthermore reformat the text disobeying the chars-per-line-
limit.

To me it' a bug that Mozilla reformat texts when quoting.

Comment 5

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

Well, I guess this is WONTFIX (I also don't like it, hence simply not use format
flawed). Probably a bug. Maybe you can find it somewhere.

Marking NEW for QA to decide.

pi

Comment 6

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Not a dupe, I don't think;removing the DUPEME note.  It is a bug; it seems that 
the rewrapping of the quoted text is done to the default width of 72.

Note that if the quoted text is not f=f, it won't rewrap, and so long lines will 
still extend beyond the default width.  Because this easy workaround exists, I'm 
reducing the severity of this bug to minor.

In either case, using   Edit|Rewrap   will bring the text back within the 
desired margin.

This looks related to bug 179266.

Comment 7

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Updating summary so as not to trigger on search for 'rewrap' (a different 
function), and to mention the f=f dependency.

Comment 8

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Revising my comment 6:
By "easy workaround," I meant using Edit|Rewrap, as described in the subsequent 
paragraph.  That was confusing.

I misunderstood bug 179266; I no longer think it is related to this bug at all.

René Stach: in your original complaint you wrote:
> Either turn this automatic rewrapping off (best solution) or set the
> chars-limit for automatic re-wrapping to "chars-limit + number of quotation
> marks added (e.g. space + >)"

These are two different goals.  Is your priority to quote the original text as 
it arrived (what you called the "best solution"), or to get the quoted text 
within the wrap limit?  This bug's summary (your original one, and the current 
one with my edits) indicates the second of these choices.

If quoting the original text as it arrived is your priority, do you think that 
should be the case even if the original text was f=f?  (Assume that the original 
text is sensibly encoded with f=f; it should be Mozilla's goal to avoid flowed 
formatting on text that shouldn't have it.)

Note that if the preference
  mailnews.display.disable_format_flowed_support
is set to true, then a quoted f=f message will not be rewrapped.  I suggest that 
this particular behavior (whether to rewrap quoted text that originally was f=f) 
deserves a separate preference.

Comment 9

[Paolo Bonzini]

Dupe of bug 387687.

Comment 11

[rsx11m]

(In reply to Paolo Bonzini from comment #9)
> Dupe of bug 387687.

Related but not a duplicate; the bug here is about re-wrapping incoming messages created with f=f whereas the issue in bug 387687 occurs when replying to messages which don't have f=f applied but where it was emulated by incorrect usage of the quoted-printable line-wrapping mechanism.