348045 - View Message Body As Plain Text shows blank for multipart/alternative with text/html part only

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: MIME, defect)

Description

[Greg Colyer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060516 SeaMonkey/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060516 SeaMonkey/1.0.2

A message with content-type multipart/alternative, containing a single sub-part, of content-type text/html, shows blank if View>Message Body As>Plain Text is selected. Instead, the HTML should be converted to plain text.

There is no attachment, and none is shown.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

This is true, for messages where the sole 'alternative' part is text/html.  
If the only 'alternative' is multipart/related (which, in turn, consists of text/html plus images or other supporting parts), then the HTML *is* downconverted.

This is the opposite of bug 253830, which is about how a multipart/alternative with multipart/related *never* shows the text/plain part.

Comment 2

[Greg Colyer]

Reverted from minor back to normal. An ordinary user, whose system may well have been set up by someone else to View>Message Body As>Plain Text, would not know to change this setting or to View Message Source.

Comment 3

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Yeah, this is not good.

What sends such messages? Appearantly they are rare, otherwise they would have shown up earlier.

What happens when you select Simple HTML? (I assume that works - it's better than As Plaintext anyways)

Comment 4

[Greg Colyer]

Simple HTML works.

No X-Mailer or other identifying information in the example message I received.

Comment 5

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Greg this might have been fixed by bug 351224. Could you take a few minutes and download the latest nightly ( http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-central/ ), backup your profile and test and let us know if this is fixed or not ?

Comment 6

[Terje Bråten]

This bug will be fixed by my patch https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=714770
that I sumbitted to bug 253830

Comment 7

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

I'll look into bug 253830 hoping that this one will be fixed, too.

Comment 8

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Attachment: Test message, multipart/alternative, but with only one HTML part.

This message shows empty when viewed as plain text with TB 49 (Daily).

If, however, the patch from bug 253830 (attachment 8757371 [details] [diff] [review]) is applied, then the message is displayed as plain text.

So as promised in comment #6, this will be fixed by bug 253830. Nice, huh?

Comment 9

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Fixed by bug 253830.

Comment 10

[Greg Colyer]

Sorry, despite searching I failed to find my own previous bug (I mean this one), and so just submitted bug 1407566. Can you please confirm whether this fix is now in release?

Comment 11

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

The attached message that only contains a HTML part in a multipart/alternative structure is displayed properly when viewed as plain text in TB 52 (current release). Can't you try this yourself?

Comment 14

[Greg Colyer]

Yes, I just updated to 52.4.0 and my own example displayed correctly. (I simply wasn't sure how your earlier reference to TB 49 (Daily) related to release.)

Thanks to all who worked on this over the years!