460226 - Red Box around tables in replies

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 463577

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[callistosmoon]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.17

I want to remove the red box that appears around some of my replies.

It doesn't consistently show up for replies, I don't know why it shows for some messages and not others. My big issue is the spell checker doesn't spell check within the red box (which I've discovered is a table?) as it does with my reply as I type, which is useless for me, as I edit other people's work via email. I need to be able to see their mistakes in their original email so I can correct them, but it's now impossible to do.

I'd like to be able to toggle this red table/cell feature off. If that's not possible, I'd like the spell check as you type feature to be able to pick up on misspelled words within the red box.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[callistosmoon]

PS: This happens when I reply sometimes - I am sure I am not pressing forward.

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I don't think the red is a bug per se, the red is there so you'd see there is a table... you can probably get rid of it by using some userchrome/usercontent.css style. People in the forums might be able to help you with that - <http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=39>

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

As for the spell checker not working (i didn't try if it does for me), why would you like to spell check what the other party wrote? That's what in the table, right?

Comment 4

[rsx11m]

There have been forum reports on this seen with messages from Yahoo. It turned out that - for some reason - they are sent in HTML within a table construct. Since that table has no border, the red table indicators appear.

If all of those messages are coming from a Yahoo account, that "feature" can probably be disabled on the sender's end. Per comment #2, the forums would be better for a discussion, as Thunderbird behaves correctly and it's not a bug.

In general, the spell checker does not check the reply text, and I'd agree that it wouldn't make sense, so this describes a intended behavior as well.

Comment 5

[callistosmoon]

Re: comment 3 - I edit people's writing via email, so I need to check for spelling errors. The easiest way is in the reply, otherwise I have to cut and paste to Word and run spell check, then cut and paste back.

Re: comment 4 - Yes! It is from Yahoo mail users only ... I hadn't noticed that. I'll see if I can find out whether the sender can disable it.

Comment 6

[rsx11m]

Ok, so - not quite unexpectedly - the primary issue was caused by the sender's format selection, thus would be "invalid" as a Thunderbird bug as it isn't actually a bug but correct behavior.

As for the spell-checker issue (ideally, only one issue should be filed per report), the quoted message is not spell-checked by design. For HTML mails, this is bug 173046, and bug 201866 for plain-text composition. In general, this is desired behavior for most cases, since the spell checker should verify correct spelling of whatever you type in yourself. I see that you have a use case here if the quote is the actual object of interest, even though this is not the primary purpose of Thunderbird's spell checker.

This bug report could be retargeted as an enhancement request for the spell-checker issue, asking for an option to also spell-check quoted text (which, by default, should be "off"), if this suggestion appears viable.

Comment 7

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Bug 463577 has more action.