284136 - Forwarding plaintext non-flowed email converts it to HTML <pre> format

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 254928

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Ben Slade]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20050111
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20050111

If I receive a plaintext email, it wraps normally in the Mozilla mail reader. 
If I then forward it, the forwarded copy has the body of the email formatted
using the <pre> tag.  This makes the forwarded email mostly unreadable because
the mail reader receiving the forwarded mail isn't allowed to wrap lines.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Have someone from AOL send you a plaintext email from the AOL webmail
interface with a long paragraph.  This will send an email with plaintext, *not*
flowed format.
2.Forward that plaintext email to yourself (from Moz to Moz mail)
3.Try and read it.

Actual Results:  
The long paragraph in the forwarded email is displayed as a single non-wrapped
line because it's formatted using the HTML <pre> tag

Expected Results:  
The paragraph should wrap like a normal email.

This bug is sort of similar to bug 196033 ["Automatically wrap quotes in
replies/followups (optional?)"], but it is different enough that I think it's
not a dupe.

If you don't know anyone at AOL who can send you an email, ask
[e-mail] if you don't know anyone on AOL.

Comment 1

[Ben Slade]

Attachment: Screen snapshot of final non-wrapped, <pre> formatted email

Comment 2

[Ben Slade]

Attachment: Screen snapshot of final non-wrapped, <pre> formatted email

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

In fact, for the case of forwarding a non-f=f message, I disagree that the 
forwarded text should not be enclosed in a <pre>.  This is because there are, 
sometimes, good reasons for sending a long line that shouldn't be wrapped.

However, I think that using Rewrap on the text should *remove* the <pre> block 
-- see the dupe, and bug 249093.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 237558 ***

Comment 4

[Ben Slade]

I respectfully disagree.

The original email had plaintext that was automatically wrapped at display time
by the Mozilla browser (and most other normal browsers).   During the forwarding
of the email, Mozilla is *adding* HTML formatting which is changing the original
email (ie. losing the "wrapped at display time by the browser" feature).

As long as your converting from "wrapped at display time" plaintext to HTML, you
should also make the HTML "wrapped at display time".   This would involve
converting line breaks in the plain text to paragraph tags in the HTML text. 
Why is that bad?  It's a much closer preservation of the original email than
adding the <pre> tag.

Yes, the rewrap function would be a workaround, but it's an ugly one.  Doesn't
it wrap the text to 72 characters?  People who use extra large fonts because of
vision problems will have to scroll back and forth (left/right) to read the
email.   That's bad.   This is not theoretical.  I work with a lot of people in
politics, and a significant percentage of the older guys have this problem.

I've worked with other text editors that were smart enough to convert plain text
to HTML with paragraph breaks, but only the smart ones.   Maybe I'm missing
something here, but I would sure like to see Mozilla take a smart approach.  Ie.
reopen this bug and take the approach of maintaining the "wrapped at display
time by the browser" for plaintext emails forwarded as HTML.

Also, since this problem recreates for me on Windows XP, I'm also changing the
Hardware and OS fields to "All"

Comment 5

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Reopening -- I duped to the wrong bug.

(In reply to comment #4)
> converting line breaks in the plain text to paragraph tags in the HTML text 
> [... is ...] a much closer preservation of the original email than
> adding the <pre> tag.

I disagree with this.  Adding the <pre> preserves, as well as possible, the 
*original* format of the message.  In some cases, long lines in the original 
text are legitimate and should not be broken.  (Example that I just encountered 
yesterday: a long DOS command line.)  In those cases, having the lines displayed 
as wrapped to the window edge is in fact the undesirable behavior.

If the original is format=flowed, then I completely agree that the <pre> should 
not be used; that's bug 249093.

By always wrapping long lines by default, you break the behavior of preserving 
legitimate long lines -- and it's much more difficult for the person composing 
the mail to unwrap a line that's been wrapped, than to wrap a line that hasn't 
been; the latter can be done automatically (i.e, the Rewrap command) but the 
former needs to be done manually.  See the similar arguments against 
automatically wrapping quoted text in a reply, at bug 196033.

The specific problem you are encountering is that the mail you want to forward 
is, itself, bogus.  There is no excuse for AOL sending out entire paragraphs as 
a single line -- long lines are contrary to the recommendation in the RFCs, and 
in extreme cases (>1000 chars) will break SMTP transport.

Comment 6

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 254928 ***