540606 - Unexpected italics in message bodies

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 128138

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Dan Wilga]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20100105 Eudora/3.0b4

Certain combinations of characters seem to cause parts of the message body to appear in italics, despite the fact that the message contains no content-type header or HTML code whatsoever.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Send a plain-text email to yourself containing the following text, which is part of an email message generated by logwatch:

  GET /students/leadership/lead/register HTTP/1.1 with response code(s) 404 1 responses
  GET /athletics/teams/spring/outdoortrack/coach/assistants HTTP/1.1 with response code(s) 404 1 responses
  GET /fac_serv/ HTTP/1.1 with response code(s) 404 1 responses
  GET /news/magazine/2007_summer/college_row/mission HTTP/1.1 with response code(s) 404 1 responses
  GET /museums/mead/programs/exhibitions/past/2006/duanemichals HTTP/1.1 with response code(s) 404 1 responses

2. View the received email.
Actual Results:  
The string "/fac_serv/" appears in italics.

Expected Results:  
The string should have no special formatting.

Comment 1

[Matt Dudziak]

Confirmed. Problem is present in Thunderbird 3.0.1 as well so I am assigning this to Thunderbird.

Comment 2

[Nathan Tuggy (:tuggyne)]

"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
I agree that this is rather annoying, but as it happens, this is actually a (*sometimes* useful) feature in Thunderbird to improve the user experience for plain text users: asterisks, underscores, slashes, and pipes are interpreted if possible as plain-text markup for bold, underline, italic, and code respectively. See the URL field for examples and further explanation, as well as <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mail_content_types#Plain_text>; take a look at <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mail_and_news_settings#Mail.> for the unofficial documentation of the preference that controls this (search for 'display_struct' without quotes to find mail.display_struct).

There are a couple of possible next steps for this bug:
*  Mark INVALID, as this is intended behavior
*  Morph the bug to be about improving TB's format heuristics to avoid italicizing path segments and similar things (known bug); in this case, DUP in favor of bug 128138
*  Morph the bug to requesting that the mail.display_struct pref (which controls this behavior) be defaulted to off (would switch to ENH; unlikely to get anywhere, as this is strongly desired by some users)

I'm assuming the second option is desired.