1751694 - Compatibility for emails with Outlook fonts containing symbols

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1756720

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[adrien.rybarczyk]

Attachment: Response_Result_In_Outlook.PNG

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4606.61 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. Create an email from Outlook containing special characters (example font: Wingdings, Symbol, Webdings)
2. Send the mail to an account mounted on Thunderbird.
3. Reply to the email by directly modifying the email of your interlocutor (for example adding details on a sentence) or copying and pasting this sentence in the body of your email.

Actual results:

The "bad" font will be kept when writing after the text.

Expected results:

If we ever send the email to an Outlook user and we continued to write text with one of the wrong fonts. The email will not be readable directly for the interlocutor.

We end up with an interlocutor who, if he does not know a little about computers, gets an unreadable email.

It would be necessary either to allow the support of these fonts (by really showing the user that he is typing an unreadable text for the correspondent), or to detect these fonts and if necessary to close the span so as not to continue writing in this style.

See example.

Comment 1

[adrien.rybarczyk]

Attachment: result_In_Thunderbird.PNG

Comment 2

[adrien.rybarczyk]

Attachment: 20220124-Send From Outlook-17254.eml

Comment 3

[adrien.rybarczyk]

Attachment: 20220124-Re_Send From Outlook-17257.eml

Comment 4

[Rachel Martin]

This issue is really that the Mozilla platform code doesn't load or display Wingdings and other symbol fonts (bug 1756720). Consequently users accidentally write a message using this font which at the recipient side uses symbols from Wingdings for display and is therefore not understood by the recipient. Instead of treating Wingdings like a "bad" font, TB should display that font so users would immediately see that they are typing symbols and not text.

Comment 5

[Ryan Lee Sipes]

Magnus, can you assign this to someone to look into and find a path forward? This is a pretty bad scenario as it breaks compatibility with another client.

Comment 6

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

See https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/smileyfixer/ and also chrome Wingdingify

Comment 7

[Rachel Martin]

FairEmail replaces Wingdings text with the corresponding Unicode:
https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/blob/master/app/src/main/java/eu/faircode/email/HtmlHelper.java#L307
https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/blob/master/app/src/main/java/eu/faircode/email/HtmlHelper.java#L2962

Comment 8

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

As I understand it, bug 1756720 fixed this issue. Can someone confirm with a daily build? http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-central/

Comment 9

[adrien.rybarczyk]

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #8)

As I understand it, bug 1756720 fixed this issue. Can someone confirm with a daily build? http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-central/

Great, everything works.

Comment 10

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Thanks for testing! Let's mark it as duplicate of bug 1756720 then.