337146 - Custom text style / color that applies only to text typed in reply or forward

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[veri03]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3
Build Identifier: http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/

As is the case with a certain other mail client or two, replies are automatically formatted to use blue text as opposed to black. To the best of my knowledge, no such option nor extension exists in Thunderbird, meaning the only way to do it is to manually specify text color on each reply individually.

Currently, the closest option to this is to use blue for all HTML replies, which changes *everything* to blue, including the quoted original message. 

An option to automatically have replies placed in blue text would be a welcome addition.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy y'all,

[1] my tbird info ...
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Thunderbird/1.5.0.2 Mnenhy/0.7.4.666 - Build ID: 2006030803

[2] the mozillazine thread that led here ...
- Use blue text in reply ONLY, Outlook style?
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=414118

[3] when using html and replying to specific points in quoted text, the way outlook [dunno about oe] handles this is very handy and very obvious. i vaguely recall ol referring to it as "citations", but that is a very vague memory.

typically, the new text embedded in the quote is blue, but that is changeable via a pref.

take care,
lee

Comment 2

[veri03]

(In reply to comment #1)

My TB information is the same as Lee's, and yeah, that is indeed the thread I started to check and see what was going on with this.

I'm hardly a developer, but it would seem to me that such a thing isn't TOO terribly hard to pull off.

Comment 3

[zug_treno]

Related to/duplicate of Core bug 210131?

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #0)
> As is the case with a certain other mail client or two, replies are
> automatically formatted to use blue text as opposed to black. 

Do you mean in the compose window, or in the display window?  And do you mean plain text, or HTML?

Plain text compose hardcodes the quote color to a blue; this is bug 152144.
Plain text display has a pref for quote color (defaults to a blue).

HTML compose always displays the quote in whatever color you've set for your editing prefs, which go out with the message.
HTML text display uses the colors in the message, if any (unless overridden by setting  browser.display.use_document_colors  to False).  If no colors specified, or if overwritten, the text is shown according to the standard colors.


> An option to automatically have replies placed in blue text would be a
> welcome addition.

This sounds like you're concerned with HTML composition.  Is the basically about the same problem as bug 212535?

Do you want to have your recipient see this in blue, or do you just want to see it in blue while you're composing?  If the latter, you can add style rules to userContent.css to customize the display; creating a rule to style  
 blockquote[type=cite]  is how this is done in the theme's messageQuotes.css, messageBody.css and the default html.css.  See the work I've done recently at bug 249109.

Generally, that would be my preferred approach; I'd rather let my recipient style the message according to his wishes.

Comment 5

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Also see bug 204974, which wants to preserve the original text's color, font-face, etc. in the reply.

Comment 6

[Samik Raychaudhuri]

I will try to answer some of the questions raised in Comment #4.

> Do you mean in the compose window, or in the display window?  And do you mean
plain text, or HTML?

It was meant in the compose window, and in HTML mode. This issue is not in the text mode (there are UserChrome.css hacks available for that). 

> Do you want to have your recipient see this in blue, or do you just want to see it in blue while you're composing?

The OP (and me too) wanted the recipient to see the reply in blue (this is what happens in MS Outlook, and this is the behavior OP is trying to address). That means that this needs to go in the HTML format before sending the mail.

Comment 8

[warren crossing]

I can confirm this happens also in Seamonkey.

You can use the DomInspector and javascript debugger to see that actually "blue reply" text is put in spans without any css style information.

Ideally the blue text should be the same as visited link color selected in preferences.

Comment 10

[warren crossing]

I can see in omni.ja[r] 

./defaults/pref/mailnews.js:pref("mail.citation_color",                 "#000000"); // quoted color

./chrome/toolkit/res/html.css:span[_moz_quote=true] {
./chrome/toolkit/res/html.css:pre[_moz_quote=true] {

can't we set them with some xul css magic that gets value from mail.citation_color? 

I looked but can't get the syntax correct? anyone?

Comment 11

[Ronald Geiken]

As of September 1, 2013, this is still a problem. In previous versions of Thunderbird, (current version is 24) this used to work. You could change your reply to a different color to make it stand out. Someplace in the last few versions even though the function is shown, it does not work. It will show the color changed, but when you start to type it reverts back to black. If you have a version 24 of Thunderbird, you should easily be able to replicate this Bug. The color change was in Thunderbird for years and worked flawlessly, but in the past few versions even though they show the function, it does not work at all!!!!!

Comment 12

[Brian V]

I am hoping that this is the correct bug to be appending this to and I apologize if it is not.

I can replicate the problem behavior when composing messages and replies exclusively with Thunderbird 31.3.0 every time.

I frequently am involved in e-mail exchanges where various participants use specific fonts and colors as a way of quickly identifying who they are.  Thunderbird is consistently changing all of the various colors used by others to the color I have chosen as my default color (but preserving the original font choices) when I reply to these messages.  The color change is applied to absolutely everything, including the, "On [date & time] [participant] wrote:" headers.  This strips the messages of what are very important visual cues.

What is interesting is that his only applies if the original messages are composed from within Thunderbird itself.  If the message is received in Thunderbird, but all prior parts of it have been composed in, say, Gmail's web interface, all font and color information is maintained.

When something composed in Thunderbird is originally received and viewed in Thunderbird, the sender's font and color choice shows up correctly in the reading pane.  When a reply to that message is made, absolutely all text that is quoted is converted to the color choice the responder has set as his or her preferred color but the fonts of all prior material, whether generated by the sender or as part of date-time information, is maintained.

Since this is limited to color changing, it appears that font information is being correctly maintained by Thunderbird through succeeding levels of quotation but color information is being stripped or overridden when composing a reply.

Comment 13

[Ronald Geiken]

It looks like this problem has been around for years, and for me personally I have one computer that has Thunderbird (Any version) and the color changing works fine. In my Lenovo Desktop it worked once upon a time, but in some revision the ability to change text color has disappeared. It shows that the text color is changed, but when you go to enter text it changes back to black. Like most of the posters here, I am not sure how this function works. Sounds like it must be pretty complicated. I have copied text from MS Word that had different colors, but when it is pasted in Thunderbird it reverts to black. I don't think that any of the Thunderbird designers know how this circuit actually works or they would have a work around for us. I used to give Thunderbird at least a B+, but today the grade is more like D. Don't expect any resolution on this problem anytime soon.