1780196 - Allow flowed text via MailExtension compose API

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Add-Ons: Extensions API, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Frederick Zhang]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Make sure mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed is set to true
2. Configure mail account to send plain text emails
3. Open a new email composing window
4. Use compose API setComposeDetails() to update its contents. isPlainText = true, plainTextBody has a trailing space at the end of each line

Actual results:

Trailing spaces are removed when the the email is sent, and the text isn't flowed despite having Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed.

Expected results:

Trailing spaces are preserved as if the text were physically typed into Thunderbird's email editor.

This allows extensions (and their users) to decide if they want flowed format. For example, I have a request at https://github.com/Frederick888/external-editor-revived/issues/48.

Comment 1

[Frederick Zhang]

Tested on 102.0.3 and got the same result as well.

Comment 2

[John Bieling]

I made a proposal in https://github.com/Frederick888/external-editor-revived/issues/48#issuecomment-2122520905

Feedback is appreciated (best to keep the discussion on GitHub in this case).

Comment 3

[John Bieling]

What we will do is to expose mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed in some sort of settings API, so you know if flowed is enabled or not.

As discussed in the github issue, an add-on can then decide if it wants to update the content of the editor with hard line breaks (if flowed is off), or remove all soft line breaks ( \n -> ) and let Thunderbird reflow the content and then apply its own flowed format.

Comment 4

[John Bieling]

Attachment: Bug 1780196 - Introduce messengerSettings API and expose preferences for mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed and mailnews.wraplength. r=#thunderbird-reviewers

The API follows the concept of the browserSetting API from Firefox.
The first two exposed preferences allow extensions to check if outgoing
messages will be using flowed format and the max line length.

The file names for the schema and implementation files
of the messengerUtilities API are adjusted to match those from the
messengerSettings API.

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/924f9969cf2b
Introduce messengerSettings API and expose preferences for mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed and mailnews.wraplength. r=mkmelin