225614 - Mail changes formatting of plain text messages

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 125928

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[John Rocha]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007

When the email reader is displaying plain text messages, it appears to be doing
some formatting of its own, which then distorts the output.

This became readily apparent to me when I was writing an email and placed an
ASCII  text flow diagram in it and I [cc]d myself with the email.  The resulting
email was NOT what I sent.

I then checked the email source using [ctl-u] and it appeared correctly
formatted there.

I then checked and noticed that View->Message Body->Original HTML was selected,
so I changed it to View->Message Body->Simple HTML, and the problem persisted.

I changed it again to View->Message Body->Plain Text and the problem persists.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Use mozilla to send the following email to yourself, and then look at it with
the mozilla email reader.
---begin email---
  CLI                       tAAA                     tAAAsub
                                                  
1 CLI accepts params                              
  from user and sends                             
  to the tAAA task -------->                      
2                           tAAA detects that     
                            this is a command     
                            change and forwards   
                            the request------------->
3                                                    tAAAsub snapshots
                                                     the current value
                                                     updates the snapshot
                                                     writes to disk and
                                                     on successful write
                                                     then updates RAM
                                                     and sends a response
        <--------------------------------------------back to the cli
---end email---
Actual Results:  
After sending this email, what appears in the email reader window is the following:
---begin email---
 CLI                       tAAA                     tAAAsub
                                                 1 CLI accepts params          
                    from user and sends                              to the tAAA
task -------->                      2                           tAAA detects
that                                this is a command                          
     change and forwards                              the request------------->
3                                                    tAAAsub snapshots
                                                    the current value
                                                    updates the snapshot
                                                    writes to disk and
                                                    on successful write
                                                    then updates RAM
                                                    and sends a response
       <--------------------------------------------back to the cli
---end email---

Expected Results:  
The email is plain text.  It should not be reformatted.  It should appear
exactly as it is sent.

I am using the classic theme.

Also, I can see this case being argued as a "trivial due to misaligned text" but
for me/us we use emails for ascii diagrams, and if the diagrams are incorrect
then  it can lead to other problems during implementation and what not.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Reporter: I'm assuming that, altho this is a plain-text mail, you used the HTML 
composer to write it -- that's how I was able to duplicate your problem, anyway.

Workarounds are: (1) use the plain-text composer (hold down Shift while clicking 
the Compose button to compose in plain-text, if the account normally composes in 
HTML); (2) be sure that none of the lines you enter in the mail have any 
trailing spaces on them; or (3) turn off format=flowed for sending mail, by 
changing this preference to False:    mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed

More on format=flowed, including a FAQ, can be found at bug 168420.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 125928 ***