386960 - English mail with Japanese charset looks too big

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 298068

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Dave T]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070603 Fedora/2.0.0.4-2.fc7 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.4 (20070615)

Noticed in emails received from email list: [e-mail]
When a list member sends an email to the list, sometimes the email is displayed with a huge font, making it difficult to read the message on smaller displays because it goes of the screen.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. on sender's machine: edit|preferences|display|fonts & encoding|fonts
2. minimum font size=24|OK|OK
3. create and send a text only email.
4. on receiver's machine: view the email from step 3.
Actual Results:  
The message is shown with a huge font.

Expected Results:  
My normal chosen font {size 9} should not be over-ridden.

1. This makes it easy for spammers to send eye-catching email even when you are setup to show all messages as text only. 
The sender should not be able to set the font size of the receiver !

2. note: allow messages to use other fonts=unticked
  The messages aren't in a different font, just the standard font at a huge size.

Comment 1

[Dave T]

Attachment: how the message is displayed image.

Versions:
$ rpm -q thunderbird
thunderbird-2.0.0.4-1.fc7
$ rpm -q kernel
kernel-2.6.21-1.3228.fc7
$ cat /etc/fedora-release 
Fedora release 7 (Moonshine)

Comment 2

[Dave T]

Attachment: the raw email whose body font is being displayed very large

I can't pick where the font size setting is getting read from :(

Comment 3

[Dave T]

closest bug I can find is bug 291521, but seems to be with utf encodings.

Comment 4

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Attachment: the email itself

Easier to look at, as just the email (Save as, .eml) rather than a tar.bz2 of a whole folder.

Comment 5

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Nothing to do with the sender's font size, and everything to do with the sender's native language combined with the default size for Japanese fonts: the email was sent in the ISO-2022-JP charset, and because East Asian characters are more readable in larger sizes, the default for them 16, where for most things it's 13 (in the browser, too: change the encoding for this bug's page to ISO-2022-JP in Firefox, and you'll see it get bigger).

We could in theory "fix" the "bug" by defaulting to smaller sizes except in Japanese/Korean/Chinese localized versions, but I doubt that it's the right thing to do: we're more likely to make things unreadable for bi- or multilingual people than we are to make things look right for this case.

Comment 6

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

This is a dupe of bug 298068. There's a workaround described in bug 298068 comment 10 and following, but I'm not sure if it will still work in current builds.

Comment 7

[Dave T]

Is the renderer of text emails in thunderbird the same as firefox's web page renderer ?