254928 - Forward unflowed plain text as HTML does not wrap

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Chad Mangel]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040623 Camino/0.8
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 0.7.1 on Mac OS X, SuSE Linux 9.1, Win XP

Although their is a setting in Thunderbird to limit the characters for page
width when an email is recieved as text, this does not work for emails that are
received as HTML.  Thus, the body of the message shows up as one long string of
text in one line.  Also, if you try to print the email, only a portion of the
line is printed since the text is not wrapping.  I realize that this is partly
because of the HTML formating and that Thunderbird is simply following these
tags.  However, in this case it is Thunderbird that is creating these tags to
cause the problem.  Please see "Steps to Reproduce" to see how this takes place.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.  An email is recieved as text with no formatting.  In my case it comes from a
web submittal page, so the body is actually one field that has no formatting and
is simply text.  The email shows up fine in Thunderbird and the text is wrapped
as it should be.
2.  Note: Thunderbird setting is to always send email as HTML.
3.  Forward the email to another Thunderbird user.
 

Actual Results:  
Email comes to 2nd user as HTML but the body is one long line of text.

Expected Results:  
Email should come through to 2nd user with HTML formatting so that the text is
wrapped, and not one long line of text.

If you need a submittal page that sends email like this, I can create one on our
site that sends the result to one of your developers.  Sending an email in text
format with Thunderbird will not produce the same result since the page width is
limited and the carriage returns are automatically inserted.  This is a standard
submittal page and nothing out of the ordinary.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #0)
> Although [there] is a setting in Thunderbird to limit the characters for page
> width when an email is recieved as text, this does not work for emails that
> are received as HTML.

I think you mean "forwarded" rather than "received" there.


> 1.  An email is recieved as text with no formatting.  In my case it comes from
> a web submittal page, so the body is actually one field that has no formatting
> and is simply text.  The email shows up fine in Thunderbird and the text is
> wrapped as it should be.
> 2.  Note: Thunderbird setting is to always send email as HTML.
> 3.  Forward the email to another Thunderbird user.

You're talking about an inline-forward of a text/plain message (without 
format=flowed -- there is a faq about f=f at bug 168420).


> Email should come through to 2nd user with HTML formatting so that the text
> is wrapped, and not one long line of text.

For true plain text (not f=f) this is actually opposite from my expectation.  
What I would like is, when forwarding such a message *as plain*, that the text 
*not* be rewrapped, but it is (see bug 262476).  That is because sometimes it is 
desirable to maintain the long line length, and manually undoing the automatic 
rewrap is substantially more difficult than manually applying a rewrap.

For text that is format=flowed, I agree that it should be rewrapped -- which, in 
the HTML case, means not wrapping the text in a <pre> block: that's bug 249093.

When composing as HTML, the workaround is to either select the quoted text and 
change its style from "preformat" to "body text" or to use Edit|Rewrap.  

Note: Edit|Rewrap applied to an entire HTML forwarded message will strip the 
table tags from around the headers.  On the other hand, in order to get Edit|
Rewrap to work only on the selection, you need to include not just the quoted 
text but the empty line above it.

When composing as plain text, Edit|Rewrap is not (currently) needed for 
forwarded messages.

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Updating summary for searchability.

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 284136 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
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you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Thank you for your help in this matter.

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Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.