429799 - Edit as New and Forward corrupt HTML messages when opening the message

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 380372

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Tom Coxon]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14 Creative ZENcast v1.02.10
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.12 (2080213) (the latest production version from the main website)

Basically both the "Edit as New" and "Forward" (with the forward as in-line option set) corrupt HTML messages as they open the messages for editing. The "Reply" function works fine.
It looks like the first character of some of the token strings gets lost, so for instance images "aren't there", and HTML tables get all scrunched up over to the left.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Create a message with an HTML table (say 3 cols by 3 rows) spanning the whole width of the message and put an image in one of the cells and some text in another
2.Save the message
3.Now go and "Edit as New" the saved version
Actual Results:  
The image will now display as the "Red dot" showing that the image can't be found and your nice HTML table will be all squashed up over on the left of your edit window.

Expected Results:  
The Opened message should look exactly like the one you saved (The saved one displays just fine until you try to edit it)

This seems to be a long standing problem with creating HTML messages in TB, but as the world is moving forwards and more and more of us want to use HTML formatting (e.g. to include "stationery" in our emails), it constrains Thunderbird from being a great email program to being merely a very good one.

Comment 1

[Joe Sabash [:JoeS1]]

I agree whole-heartedly with your last statement:

"This seems to be a long standing problem with creating HTML messages in TB, but
as the world is moving forwards and more and more of us want to use HTML
formatting (e.g. to include "stationery" in our emails), it constrains
Thunderbird from being a great email program to being merely a very good one."

There are many pitfalls in composer/editor in composing HTML, and there is probably a dup of this one, to find out, it would help if you attached the html in question.

If your reference to the 'saved mail' refers to an .eml file, then that is relevent also.

There are many work-arounds for html composition, and one of mine is to not use eml files as a method of saving.

Comment 2

[Joe Sabash [:JoeS1]]

Poster: This looks like a dup of bug 380372, if you disagree, please re-open.
Also reated to bug 224733 if any editing is involved.

My personal work-around for this is to not save as a draft, but rather use
File>>send later. This will place the composition in the unsent folder intact.
If you want to edit it later, just open it and "edit as new"

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

> It looks like the first character of some of the token strings gets lost, so
> for instance images "aren't there", and HTML tables get all scrunched up over
> to the left.

This sounds more like bug 307023, but either way, it would be a duplicate.

Workaround here is to uncheck "quoted-printable" encoding in Tools > Options > Composition > General tab, at least for those messages that you write yourself.