629681 - Multipart/alternative with reversed order of text/plain and text/html parts will not show up as HTML (in spite of "view message body as HTML")

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 574989

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Neil Parks]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b9) Gecko/20110115 Firefox/4.0b9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101207 Thunderbird/3.1.7

The attached email message has HTML and plain text parts.  But only the plain text part appears in Tbird.


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Neil Parks]

Attachment: Email has text and html parts but only text part appears

Comment 2

[Joe Sabash [:JoeS1]]

Yes, I'm seeing only the plaintext rendering here.
But usually multipart/alternative has the plaintext part first ,whereas this sample is reversed.

Comment 3

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Email has text and html parts but only text part appears

> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="--6500178e8812637faace714cb363242a"

> ----6500178e8812637faace714cb363242a
> Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"
> ----6500178e8812637faace714cb363242a
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

Because of multipart/alternative, Tb shows part which has largest "order of increasing faithfulnes", text/plain part, according to mail sender's request.
(a) View/Message Body As=Plain Text (this mode can't show HTML part as HTML) 
    Tb shows text/plain part according to your request and sender's request.
(b) View/Message Body As=HTML (this mode can show both HTML mail and text mail)
    Tb show most preferable text/plain part in your case.  
If order of parts is reverted(correct order), Tb shows text/html part by (b), according to definition of multipart/alternative.
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2046#section-5.1.4
Unforunately, Tb doesn't have feature to force text/html part selecion in your case(wrong order).

Comment 4

[davis.157]

I'm looking at this as a potential Eudora OSE user and former user of Eudora from Qualcomm.  Under "classic" Eudora, a multipart/alternative message wherein the text/html body part comes before the text/plain body part will be rendered as HTML.  Admittedly, this is not compliant with RFC 2046, but I would venture to guess that many (most?) other MUAs will also render such a message as HTML when the user requests it.  I recently received an order acknowledgement from Dell and the message was formulated this way.  I verified that T'bird has View-> Message Body As-> Original HTML, but couldn't understand why content was missing from the message.  (I knew the message had HTML content after a quick preview in a text-based e-mail client.)  I read the message with Qualcomm's Eudora, and that led me to this apparent problem with T'bird.  As a MUA, T'bird should always try to follow the basic Internet tenet of being conservative with what it generates, but be liberal in what it accepts.  This behavior can easily be interpetted as data loss.  For example, had I not used Qualcomm Eudora to read the message from Dell, I would not have been aware of the link they provided to track my order (which was not included in the text/plain body part).

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Thunderbird/3.1.10

Cheers

Comment 5

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

I also have this issue I think it is cause Thunderbird tries to display the message before all of it has downloaded resulting it it not being interpreted as HTML 
it works of you go to another message then come back but you have to do it every time which is annoying

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:5.0) Gecko/20110628 Thunderbird/5.0 Lightning/1.0b4

Comment 6

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

This should be fixed long ago by bug 574989.