216678 - Signature stripping in replies strips non-signature text

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 201581

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[Aaron Nowack]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; sbcydsl 3.12; YComp 5.0.0.0)
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.1 (20030723)


The signature stripping code seems to work simply by eliminating all text below 
a "--" from the reply.  If "--" was only used to deliniate signature, which 
were always placed at the very end of an e-mail, this would be fine.

However, there are improperly formatted e-mails, digests of e-mail lists, and 
people who might use "--" for some other purpose, and Thunderbird does not 
properly handle these e-mails.

Suggestion: Signature stripping be removed or made optional.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Find an e-mail with additional content other than signature below "-- "
2. Reply to it.

Actual Results:  
All content below "-- " is removed from reply.

Expected Results:  
All content remains in reply.

Comment 1

[Aaron Nowack]

Attachment: test case

Added testcase.

An e-mail of this form will trigger this bug, stripping both "possible
signature here" and "more content here"

Comment 2

[Chuck Harkness]

I agree. It's probably safe to say that most people today expect text processing
software to operate on the WYSIWYG principle.  Automatic stripping of text,
signature or otherwise, goes against that.  It's also probably safe to say that
most people will not be familar with the "-- " convention, so the behavior will
just look like a buggy program to them.  That's not good for Thunderbird's
reputation!

I suppose it would make things a little more clear if the option selection text
was changed to say; "Automatically quote the original message when replying,
except that the quote will not include any text after a line in the message
which consists solely of the text string "-- "."; but that seems a lot to put
into the dialog window.

Having it as a separate option and not having it be the default would be okay I
guess. Then it wouldn't happen to a new user unless they turned on the option,
and they would hopefully make the connection between the behavior they see and
the option they just turned on.  That way they at least wouldn't think it was a
bug in Thunderbird.

It would be best in my opinion to just leave the signature/text stripping
behavior out of Thunderbird altogether thus eliminating confusion for users, 
saving the code it takes to implement it, and eliminating the work to maintain it.

Comment 3

[Chuck Harkness]

I want to qualify my previous comment. My comments were in the context of email,
not usenet messages.  I appreciate the usefulness of the "-- " delimiter and
signature stripping for usenet messages, where it helps reduce the size of
message stores on news servers where the same message is replicated on many
servers, and where quoting an entire message is rarely considered good practice. 

Sorry for not being more clear the first time.

Comment 4

[Robert Mohr]

(In reply to comment #2)
> I suppose it would make things a little more clear if the option selection text
> was changed to say; "Automatically quote the original message when replying,
> except that the quote will not include any text after a line in the message
> which consists solely of the text string "-- "."; but that seems a lot to put
> into the dialog window.

How about "Automatically quote the original message when replying", as well as
"Include the original signature when replying".

Comment 5

[Matt Seitz]

A similar bug (bug 230532) has been filed against Mozilla.  It would be nice if
this could be fixed in both Mozilla and Thunderbird.

Comment 6

[Al Maw]

Disagree with removing it entirely - most of the time it's useful, some of the
time it gets it wrong. Changing the behaviour so that it doesn't get it wrong
would be better than removing it altogether.

How about one of the following:

 - Strips text below the "-- " but only up to the first carriage return.

 - Only strips text below the "-- " if it's less than 8 lines long.

Either of these would be preferrable to removing it entirely, and would fix
things 99% of the time.

This is particularly annoying with people who think they know about e-mail and
add a sig sep, but then use Outlook which top-posts replies.

Comment 7

[Kenneth]

(In reply to comment #0)
> User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; sbcydsl
3.12; YComp 5.0.0.0)
> Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.1 (20030723)
> 
> 
> The signature stripping code seems to work simply by eliminating all text below 
> a "--" from the reply.  If "--" was only used to deliniate signature, which 
> were always placed at the very end of an e-mail, this would be fine.
> 
> However, there are improperly formatted e-mails, digests of e-mail lists, and 
> people who might use "--" for some other purpose, and Thunderbird does not 
> properly handle these e-mails.
> 
> Suggestion: Signature stripping be removed or made optional.
> 
> Reproducible: Always
> 
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1. Find an e-mail with additional content other than signature below "-- "
> 2. Reply to it.
> 
> Actual Results:  
> All content below "-- " is removed from reply.
> 
> Expected Results:  
> All content remains in reply.

Comment 8

[Kenneth]

(In reply to comment #0)
> User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; sbcydsl
3.12; YComp 5.0.0.0)
> Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.1 (20030723)
> 
> 
> The signature stripping code seems to work simply by eliminating all text below 
> a "--" from the reply.  If "--" was only used to deliniate signature, which 
> were always placed at the very end of an e-mail, this would be fine.
> 
> However, there are improperly formatted e-mails, digests of e-mail lists, and 
> people who might use "--" for some other purpose, and Thunderbird does not 
> properly handle these e-mails.
> 
> Suggestion: Signature stripping be removed or made optional.
> 
> Reproducible: Always
> 
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1. Find an e-mail with additional content other than signature below "-- "
> 2. Reply to it.
> 
> Actual Results:  
> All content below "-- " is removed from reply.
> 
> Expected Results:  
> All content remains in reply.

I have this same problem in e-mail digests.  My signature messes up the rest of
the digest.  I guess I'll just leave off my sig until there's a fix.  Everything
after the sig is dim as if it's part of the sig, and if I reply, everything
after the sig isn't formatted as if someone else e-mailed it.  It's formatted as
if it's a part of my sig.  I'll just have to leave off my sig 'cause this is
probably messing up everybody or just Thunderbird users?

Comment 9

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Sig-stripping is a core function.

Moving, changing to severity=enhancement.

Comment 10

[Francis Tang]

I'd just like to point out that this sig-stripping feature makes it near
impossible to reply to mailing lists delivered in digest form.  This is a very
real problem for yahoogroups digests.

Comment 11

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 272978 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 201581 ***