323867 - Allow changing sent plaintext mail to HTML with "Edit As New"

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 78794

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Biswa]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20050509
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20050509

Toolbar disappear when edit a new sent mail in plain text only.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Launch thunderbird.
2. Write a new mail and send it with "Send in Plain Text Only(recommended)".
 ("Formatting Toolbar "exists in composition window and "View"->"Toolbars")
3. Go to "Sent" folder and select the mail just sent.
4. Click mouse_right and select "Edit As New"

Actual Results:  
 Popup composition window, but "Formatting Toolbar" disappear from the window,and it also disappear from "View"->"Toolbars".

Expected Results:  
Popup composition window,and the mail can be edited again.

When mail sent with "Send in Plain Text and HTML" or "Send in HTML Only", the bug can not be reproduced.

Comment 1

[MarkJ99]

The status of this shouldn't be "unconfirmed", because it's easy to reproduce with  most (all?) recent email clients of mozilla suite, such as Mozilla 1.7.8 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511) and Thunderbird V1.5 (20051201).

But it's a bug or a "feature" is debatable.  And while I consider it a "bad feature",  I can understand why this behavior is likely intentional.  

If you try to "edit as new" a received plain text message, you will not have a formatting toolbar, nor are you even offered the option of enabling the "formatting toolbar" via the "View-->Toolbars" menu.   This makes sense, because, as a plain text message, rtf/html formatting commands cannot be used.

But I think a more user friendly behavior would be to allow the user to enable the formatting toolbar, and to promote the body of the message to html/rtf if the user does select a formatting option, such as bolding or italics.

So perhaps this should be tagged as a "request for feature".  And I'd vote for this feature.

Cheers.

Comment 2

[lijuan wang]

reproduced on Snv62
Thunderbird version 2.0.0.0 (20070423)

I agree with Mark Johnson and change the Status to new.

Comment 3

[duparchy]

Thunderbird version 2.0.0.x

bug always reproducible. 

I don't think it's a "feature" because on the other hand, "reply" works well. (if you reply a to email received in text/plain, you are able to send HTML)

Comment 4

[Hugh Gunz]

I agree with the need to do something about this, regardless of whether it's a bug or a "feature". The workaround -- to copy all the text and paste it into a new composition window -- is only a minor irritation, of course, but an irritation nevertheless.

Comment 5

[rsx11m]

This appears to be a duplicate of MailNews Core bug 78794, even though it reads "allow the user to enable the formatting toolbar" in comment #1, thus not necessarily reopening the message in HTML mode by default.

Comment 6

[HHahn]

When I receive an HTML-formatted e-mail, it "proves" the sender's e-mail client is able to handle HTML-formatted e-mails. So is mine (Thunderbird).
So I do not see any reason whatsoever why I should be forced to loose both the original message's formatting AND the ability to (re)format using the formatting toolbar.

For those who don't like formatted e-mails, a simple command "Strip formatting" (maybe even as a configuration option) would suffice.

Comment 7

[rsx11m]

HHahn, the problem is the reverse: If the message was sent in plain-text format and you select "Edit as New", it will open in plain-text composition mode. It is already possible to downconvert an HTML-composed message to plain-text with Options > Format > Plain Text Only, so that's not an issue.

Comment 8

[HHahn]

No, I am afraid you are reversing things.
Even when I write an HTML(!) e-mail to myself(!), I can be pretty sure it is in TB's own format, so there should be no conversion problem. Indeed I am receiving the message as HTML. Nevertheless, when I try to reply (or forward) the received message, TB just strips the HTML and turns the format to plain text. The same happens when I "Edit message as new", or when I copy(!) the received(!) HTML message to the Concepts folder (in order to re-edit from there).

When a message is sent as plain text, I can understand that reformatting the reply using HTML is "not wise", as the original sender (i.e. the receiver of the reply) may not be able to read HTML.
However, when I receive a really formatted(!) HTML message, I can be sure the sender can handle HTML, so there is no reason to prevent me form replying using HTML.

On the other hand, if it seems so difficult to get my problem across, I wonder if it may be a configuration problem in my TB installation.
Anyone wgo got an idea on this?

Comment 9

[rsx11m]

(In reply to comment #8)
> When a message is sent as plain text, I can understand that reformatting the
> reply using HTML is "not wise", as the original sender (i.e. the receiver of
> the reply) may not be able to read HTML.

Actually, that's not the case. Many e-mail clients (including Thunderbird) use some auto-detect logic to figure if there is sufficient formatting to send a message in HTML, and will revert to plain text if no special formatting is present. Thus, you can't imply that the sender can't handle HTML messages.

If you read the description of this bug report, the special case of "Edit as New" not allowing HTML composition when the original message was sent in plain text is the subject here, not recoding of an HTML message to reply or forward. Thus, comment #6 and comment #8 probably should have gone into other bugs as those recoding issues are not covered by this specific bug.

> On the other hand, if it seems so difficult to get my problem across, I wonder
> if it may be a configuration problem in my TB installation.

For reply and forward, the setting in the Composition & Addressing section, top checkbox, is used to determine in which mode the composition window opens.

Comment 10

[HHahn]

@ comment #9
As for my "Composition @ addressing" setting: It has always been and still is set at "Compose messages in HTML format" = true.
And still, even messages I wrote using my TB and sent to myself, reading them with the same TB and then replying of forwarding them mostly changes them to become text mode.
The the actual problem is still not explained.