323217 - Message view window in plain text mode arbitrarily takes out carriage returns

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 261467

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Walter Milligan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 1.5 (20051201)

When viewing messages in plain text mode, even messages that were sent in plain text format, Thunderbird sometimes takes out the carriage returns (return key, end of line) and "joins" lines or eliminates blank lines.  Clicking on "view message source" reveals that the carriage returns are still in the file.  

It does this in some messages but not all.  Multiple sending of the same message seems to give the problem in the same lines, but I can't figure out the key.  It happened in 1.07 and I installed 1.5 to see if it is fixed - no dice.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Any reason not to dupe this to bug 197130?

Comment 2

[Walter Milligan]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Any reason not to dupe this to bug 197130?
> 

Sorry, I did not see that.  The "bugs" do appear to be similar, but not identical.  That bug occurs when using the word-wrap function. I detest word-wrap functions on text editors and ALWAYS put in a carriage return (leftover from the good-old vi and programming days.)  

Even when I put in a hard carriage return, the text display window messes with my formatting and arbitrarily strips carriage returns.  They are sent properly; I can see that when I open my "sent" or "in" box with another application or when I look at the message source.  But this poses serious issues when trying to copy and paste from sent or received messages to new compositions.  

I will check the FAQ's on the other bugs and see if I can rectify this.  I will also do some testing to see if taking out the "space" before the carriage return solves the problem.

Thanks for the feedback, I do appreciate it.  However:

Frankly, comments like "if only the newbies knew what they were doing this problem would go away" are annoying.  I've been programming and working with computers for 27 years . . . and the source of this "bug" seems pretty arcane to me.  You should not need to be a systems administrator to properly use an e-mail app.  Otherwise, why not go back to vi, elm and uuencode?   ;)  They never messed with my carriage returns . . . 

Comment 3

[Walter Milligan]

OK, I went to the FAQ and turned of format=flowed in the advanced configuration file.  That seems to have fixed my immediate problem, but I suspect that Mozilla will continue to get these types of reports in the future at an increasing rate.

Thanks for pointing out the similar bug and the FAQ.

I'm still not sure if this is a duplicate bug, because I had word wrap set to 0 and manually put in the carriage returns.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #3)
> I had word wrap set to 0 and manually put in the carriage returns.

Ah -- this is bug 261467, which exhibits the same problem as the 
more-commonly-reported bug bug 125928 (HTML composition sent as plain).


(In reply to comment #2)
> Frankly, comments like "if only the newbies knew what they were doing this
> problem would go away" are annoying.  

The only reference to "newbie" I see is in the initial report at bug 168420; 
if that's what you're referring to, I think you've mischaracterized the 
attitude of that initial comment.  The subsequent discussion in that bug gets heated, but that's an argument between proponents of two equally arcane points of view.


> I've been programming and working with computers for 27 years . . . and the
> source of this "bug" seems pretty arcane to me.  You should not need to be
> a systems administrator to properly use an e-mail app.

It is arcane; and fixing these few known bugs would go a long way towards solving the overall problem.  Unfortunately, nobody currently active on 
Mozilla development is all that interested in this problem, as it works well enough for most people -- because most people don't "detest word wrap" (which sentiment makes me wonder why you *don't* use Pine or elm or somesuch).

If you can program, everyone involved would be quite happy if you would learn the code well enough to generate a patch to kill this bug.  And if you take a look at the code and throw up your hands in despair -- well, that's why we're 
in the boat we're in.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 261467 ***

Comment 5

[Walter Milligan]

Thaks for the help - I do appreciate it, and I apologize for getting snotty in my comments.