524467 - Tbird forced plaintext reply or forwarding of email with multi-part mime and quoted printable as subsections

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[L A Walsh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-UTF-8; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.22 (20090605)

I receive emails from people who have used MS-Word as their composer, it puts the emails in multi-part quoted printable sections (even when it wouldn't need to).

Tbird displays it ok, but any reply or forward of the message gets set to a plaintext message disregarding address book settings saying the the person  prefers  HTML email.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. get email from someone using outlook and word as their composition editor.
2. Email is formatted on screen as HTML.  Try to reply in HTML...can't.
3.
Actual Results:  
Reply come up with plaintext enforced (no option to switch to HTML).

Expected Results:  
Reply in same format I see the message (rich text/html).

Attaching message in .eml that caused this on my machine.

Well..will have to attach it later, since there is no option to create an attachment showing the problem on the problem submission form....

(that should be a bug by itself!)

Comment 1

[L A Walsh]

Attachment: testcase1.eml: message with multi-part mime in quoted printable

This is a message I could not respond to without T-bird forcing plaintext on me.

Comment 2

[L A Walsh]

Raising severity:
Reason:  This bug affects many responses -- __seemingly randomly__ to some people, based on how outlook encodes the message.  Outlook's encoding is based on the sending user's settings and what HTML properties they use in the message, so it can vary on a per/message basis.  

Ex: messages containing image, or any message containing any non-7-bit encodable character.  
  - So you send an HTML message with an accented a:  "á" and your encoding is UTF-8 (maybe iso-8859-1 as well, haven't tried).

  - They respond, and if their settings convert 8-bit to mime encoded, it's likely you'll see the result just fine in your message window, but when you try to reply (NOTE: my settings say to always use UTF-8 in composing or replies, but display the message in the message's stated encoding) you'll be thrown into the plain-text editor with no way to respond or even forward the message in HTML.

  -  This makes TB unable to respond in any reasonable way to Outlook messages.

  -  There are various references sprinkled through the bug-database regarding problems dealing with mime-encoded messages.  It is likely they can all be fixed in 1 place where conversions can be done to the user's compose-window's preferences and all will go away. 

 I see this compatibility as one  _critical_ requisite for Tbird to be seen as a drop-in replacement for Outlook users.

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

wfm tb17/winxp

- testcase 1 (attachment 408391 [details]) correctly showing as HTML-formatted
- reply to testcase 1 correctly showing HTML editor

L.A. Walsh, if still broken for you, feel free to reopen with new testcase or more detailed steps (list any deviation from TB default settings)