Closed Bug 362342 Opened 18 years ago Closed 16 years ago

Plain Text Messages Appear in Light Gray Color

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

PowerPC
macOS
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: immessagebored, Assigned: mscott)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3
Build Identifier: MacOSX Tiger/Thunderbird version 1.5.0.8 (20061025)

Initially, plain text in messages displays as a light gray color.

You can get the text to display dark gray (= antialiased black) like this:

1. In Preferences/Display/Formatting, in the "When Displaying Quoted Plain Text Messages" section, change the "Style" and "Size" pulldowns to "Bold Italic"/"Bigger".

2. Close the preferences window. Compose-send-receive an email to yourself. Quit Thunderbird

3. Reopen Thunderbird, reset the "Style" and "Size" preferences to "Regular"/"Regular".

(All those steps may not be necessary.)

For new messages that you send and receive, plain text will (hopefully) now be dark gray (= antialiased black).

But this does not fix text in Compose windows or View Message Source window -- that remains light gray.

For old sent/received messages the behavior is varied:  some old messages will now appear dark gray. Some remain light gray. The distinction causing light gray seems to be whether there is quoted text in the old message (first level quote, with blue margin line). If you do Edit As New and send with these old light gray messages, the new message received is also light gray. But if you start fresh and send-receive-reply-receive an entirely new message to yourself (producing the same first level quote with blue margin line), the new message will be dark gray. There is no text formatting code visible in View Message Source for any of these messages.

Reproducible: Always
Note this bug may be related to bug #362343
The Steps To Reproduce look like a lot of flailing around; they're really not helpful at all.  I'm certainly not going to waste my time trying to reproduce them.  If you're convinced there's a bug, you have to start over with a new profile and determine the minimum number of steps to get from one state to another.

Despite your mentions of "plain text" it's really not clear that you have determined the difference between HTML and plain.  The problem as described sounds very much like some messages were sent as HTML, and some were sent as plain text.  If an actual plain text message is displaying with the expected colors, and some other message is not, then that other message is almost certainly an HTML message, unless you've somehow added extra styling to distinguish between text/plain with format=flowed, and without.

Is the compose window plain text or HTML?

Note that the preferences in Tools | Options | Display setting colors "for HTML messages" actually sets the colors for both plain text and HTML.  You can force the display to use your system colors if you prefer; set the pref
  browser.display.use_system_colors
to True.  But whether this is set or not, the same colors used for plain text messages should be seen with View|Source.
What Mike said. -> WFM.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 16 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
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