470062 - Switching Delivery Format from Rich Text (HTML) to plain text does not 'unformat' the message editing display (dataloss especially when replying to HTML message)

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[John R Pierce]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.18 (20081105)

I usually prefer to send plain text email but sometimes need to send rich text.   If I set Mozilla for plain text default, there's no way to switch to rich text, so I have to set it for rich text, and switch to plaintext when thats what I want.

if I switch the message compose window to plaintext, the formatting remains displayed, and bunches of simple editing functionality behaves somewhat irrationally (paragraph line spacing in particular)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. have mozilla in rich text compose mode by default, reply to an existing message
2. Options -> Format -> Plain Text Only

Actual Results:  
display of existing 'quoted' text in window does not change

Expected Results:  
I expect to only see plain text in Plain Text Only edit windows

Comment 1

[David Ward]

Same behavior with latest Thunderbird 3.0b3pre, running under Ubuntu Linux 9.04.  Additionally, this same behavior happens when composing a new message and trying to switch to plain text format -- not just when replying to an existing message.

Should this be tagged as [b3ux]?

Comment 2

[David Ward]

Can someone please confirm and triage? This has been open several months and still persists in latest comm-central. I feel that this is a significant user experience concern.

Bugzilla maintainers -- please change operating system of this bug to "all", as I can verify this behavior under Ubuntu Linux 8.10 and 9.04, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 as well.

Comment 3

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

Confirming, still in Thunderbird 6(!) and noting that it's a major pain.  Closely related to (and possible partial of full dup of) bug 509316 and/or bug 216132.  Bumping to major, flag/etc cleanup.

Discussed this bug with maintainers over lunch at the All-Hands

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

This looks like a meta bug to me, and we certainly have several dependant bugs covering unexpected dataloss and violation of ux-wysiwyg because we don't update composition editor to show the plain vanilla plaintext version that will actually get sent.

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

To find related bugs, check out delivery-format-ux tracker bug 889315.

Comment 8

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Needed for bug 140800.