308576 - HTML emails received by some Plain Text recipients missing specific spaces

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 645771

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[evervigilant]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 MultiZilla/1.7.7.0e
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 MultiZilla/1.7.7.0e

When I send a message in HTML to certain recipients viewing in plain text, some
of the spaces disappear.  This is visible in their replies to me.  When compared
to the source code of the sent messages, it is clear that the missing spaces
come where there were line breaks (probably \n) in the mail source, but no HTML
tags (see Actual v. Expected for example).

It seems that some recipients' email clients are simply stripping the new line
character without replacing it with a space.  Certainly, those clients should be
better designed, but since it's quite frequent (particularly among webmail
recipients), could Mozilla could add a whitespace character to the source or
something to account for this (or even strip the new lines from HTML messages
and convert them to spaces or <br> tags as appropriate).  It's a real problem
with people I haven't realized are viewing it in Plain Text, since it makes me
look like I can't find the space key.

Although I'm not posting an entire email message here, I am happy to send a
complete example email plus original source to whoever works on this.  Feel free
to contact me.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Send an HTML email with several lines of text to a recipient with plain text
webmail (sbcglobal, etc.)
2.  Open the email as the recipient and note missing spaces throughout email.
3.  Compare this to the source of the message saved in your Sent folder.
4.  (Optional) Reply to the message, and you will see the missing spaces in the
reply when opened in Mozilla.
Actual Results:  
This is the example of how it looks to the recipient:

>"if it ain'tbroke..."

Expected Results:  
This is the source code that would produce the above when sent to some plain
text clients:

<sentence deleted for privacy>... "if it ain't
broke..."<br>

Clearly, this should be interpreted as "if it ain't broke..."

Thank you for looking into this!

Comment 1

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

MozillaAS v1.7.x is not supported anymore.

Can you reproduce with SeaMonkey v1.1.9 ?


(In reply to comment #0)
> Although I'm not posting an entire email message here, I am happy to send a
> complete example email plus original source to whoever works on this.  Feel
> free
> to contact me.

Attaching (an example of) the messages to the bug could help...

Comment 2

[ssnyderjunk]

Greetings,

I believe I am experiencing the same problem with Thunderbird as of the 3.0.3 upgrade I performed recently.  Prior to that, posts were fine using either HTML or plain text.  Now, it appears that commas might be forcing a problem as there are no hard line breaks in my original text at the locations spaces are being deleted in the received text.  It does appear, however, that in my case at least, this happens in the vicinity of a comma.  Otherwise, it could be coincidental.

If I force HTML, then spaces are missing in the recipient's message.  If I send as plain text, line breaks are inserted rather than spaces being deleted.

This is rather distressing as I am trying to post to my courses at the University of Phoenix online and I serve as a course facilitator for them.  Having moved to Windows 7 64 bit about a month ago, I found Thunderbird as an alternative to Outlook Express after leaving Win XP.  With the 3.0.3 upgrade, the messages, once received by UOPX, look rather awful.  I in fact had to apologize to a class recently as I did not discover the malformed posts until after a number of them were made.  

I, too, can provide examples.  The only soft return, or word-wrap location is after the "of":

Original Text:

Think about how computer technology permeates society.  Throughout the day, you encounter many types of computerized devices at the grocery store, fast food chains, school, and work.

Receiving-side text if sent as HTML only:

Think about how computer technology permeates society.  Throughout theday, you encounter many types of computerized devices at the grocerystore, fast food chains, school, and work.

Receiving-side text if sent as Plain Text only (hard line returns were found after the "the" directly after "Throughout" and after "grocery":

Think about how computer technology permeates society. Throughout the
day, you encounter many types of computerized devices at the grocery
store, fast food chains, school, and work.

Thanks!