1901649 - Missing Blank Line before Signature in New Messages

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Jonathan Joseph Chiarella]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0

Steps to reproduce:

Assuming plain text composition, create a new message by clicking on New Message within Thunderbird or by clinking a link on a website that creates a new e-mail.

Actual results:

New message window appears and the signature delimiter (--<CR><LF>) is on the second line, which means that if you type a message, there will be no blank line before the delimiter. If a website link auto-fills an e-mail, the message will also lack the blank line between the body and the signature delimiter.

Expected results:

A new message window should appear with the signature delimiter (--<CR><LF>) on the third line, which means that if you type a message, there will be a blank line before the delimiter. If a website link auto-fills an e-mail, the message will also show the blank line between the body and the signature delimiter.

Comment 1

[Jonathan Joseph Chiarella]

Correction:

--<SPACE><CR><LF>

Comment 2

[Jonathan Joseph Chiarella]

Attachment: Blank line absent and present before the signature

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I don't know.... one may or may not want that new line. In any case, it's easy enough to press enter and get one.

Comment 4

[Jonathan Joseph Chiarella]

^ Is the solution to just tell everyone to manually enter a blank line, then?

It is inconsistent behavior, and I cannot recommend Thunderbird to normal people as a result of the bad look of such messages.

I looked through old e-mails from the 1990s. Sure enough, the blank line was there.

It visually helps people notice a break between the body and the signature.

People who receive messages without the blank line will complain to the senders or quietly grumble about it. I cannot put people in the position of being the targets of criticism because of a bad recommendation that I made. As a result, I am hesitant to recommend Thunderbird.

(The HTML message composer has its own issues too, but this bug report is about the plain text message composer.)

I appreciate the years of work that went into Thunderbird. I just see this as a simple fix in the code. (Correct me if I"m wrong.)

Thank you for your time.