691998 - Thunderbird does not create Outlook 2010-compatible HTML emails

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Lincoln Ramsay]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/10.04 Chromium/12.0.742.112 Chrome/12.0.742.112 Safari/534.30

Steps to reproduce:

I received an email from an Outlook 2010 user. I replied to the email using inline quoting. The email was send as multi-part MIME with plain text and HTML parts.


Actual results:

The Outlook user could not read my email because it did not render properly. As far as I can tell, blockquote (which Thunderbird uses for quotations in HTML emails) simply does not work in Outlook 2010 (and probably 2007 too since it also uses Word to render HTML emails).


Expected results:

The email should have rendered properly, so that the quoted bits were differentiated from the parts I wrote.

There seem to be 2 options for HTML email:
1) Include quote characters (>) as with plain text quoting.
2) Use <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt"> or similar for indenting instead of <blockquote> (this is what Outlook sends when you indent text).

The other option is to avoid sending HTML to Outlook users. In my case I can blacklist a single domain to get most of the people I send emails to but not everyone.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Can we get a screenshot of how it looks in Outlook and an email showing the issue (save the email in .eml and attach it here with the screenshot using the add an attachment link) ?

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

<blockquote> is standard HTML, thus using a proprietary Microsoft class or even a hard-coded inline style wouldn't be a good solution. There are bug 45268 as well as bug 183219 pending to replace the type="cite" attribute with something better so that other e-mail clients recognize it properly.

Comment 3

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

First level of quote (introduced by TB): The quote will be indented in Outlook, so the quote and the original text can be differentiated. The only thing missing is the blue bar at the left.
Second level of quote (introduced by Outlook and copied by TB): The <p class=""> will stay. The style="" is presentational and must not carry meaning. It may be stripped by Thunderbird, in order to avoid bad or even malicious HTML like hiding text. If Outlook relies on presentational HTML for semantics, that's an Outlook bug. Older Outlook used to create a proper <blockquote>, not a <p> - further showing that this is a regression in Outlook that we can do little about.

This bug may also be dependent on which editor the Outlook user uses: inline or MS Word.

Comment 4

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

We really need the info:
1. What did we receive from Outlook - the HTML
2. What did we send when we quoted that - the HTML
3. How does that render in Outlook 2010

Comment 5

[Lincoln Ramsay]

I no longer work for that company so I don't have to deal with Outlook emails anymore. Now my integration problems are with Lotus Notes.

I did mention how Outlook does its "indents" in the description.