76126 - Mails are displayed in fixed width fonts even if configured properly in Preferences

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Backend, defect)

Description

[Seak, Teng-Fong]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; 0.8.1) Gecko/20010413
BuildID:    2001041304

In Preferences > Mail and Newsgroup > Message display, I enabled "Variable width
fonts" and variable width fonts in Fonts are Times and Arial. But most messages
are displayed just in fixed width fonts, except those which are sent in HTML
format ... or in the situation I'm going to describe here below.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Send yourself an email in plain text format.
2. Open Save folder to read that message. It should be displayed in variable
width font. Check its "message source" to see that the sent message has
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=XXXXXX; format=flowed
3. Quit Mozilla, delete Send.msf, edit Save. In the file, remove
; format=flowed
from that message.
4. Reopen Mozilla and open Save folder to see that message again.  It should be
displayed in fixed width fonts instead!

Actual Results:  Messages displayed in fixed width fonts.

Expected Results:  Every plain text message is displayed in variable width font.

It's very interesting to see that how format=flowed affects the whole message
renderer. IMHO, whether a message contains
Content-Type: text/plain; ......
or not, it should be treated as plain text first, unless it has HTML in another
MIME part.

But I'm wondering if this could be a problem in my preference file. That file
comes from N4.7x, then N6.01 and Mozilla 0.8 before being used by Mozilla
20010413. Could it be removed properly?

Comment 1

[R.K.Aa.]

Seeing this with a fresh profile/linux cvs as well.
I don't know if the behaviour is deliberate or not, but it's not very intuitive.

Judging by older related bugs, this is mailnews back-end.
Changing component, status new.

Comment 2

[Paul Kelly]

I'm bitten by this bug too, but it's a little wider in scope and a little more
obscure. For any email missing a format=flowed, it will totally ignore all my
font settings, aside from font size, and run home to the butt-ugly default
system font called "fixed" (which happens to be a fixed width font). This
happens even if in preferences I have selected to view emails in a fixed width
font, and I have selected a nice font like Adobe Courier.

This happens with 0.9.2 and a nightly build from the 9th, both on RedHat 7.1.

Comment 3

[Robert.B.Miller]

Bob Miller

Moz 0.9.2 - For me, the problem only occurs in the Modern skin. The Classic skin
mail fonts are OK. This was not a problem in the Moz 0.8 series.

Comment 4

[Paul Kelly]

Well spotted sir.

I can confirm that this problem does not show itself under the Classic theme and
I was using Modern.

Comment 5

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

I'm the reporter and I can confirm this too. But how come this could happen?
Together with other bugs (like the "yellow smiley" bug reported before), it
seems the skin/theme isn't quite independent from the rest. Better look into it
to see if there's any obscure influence from the theme.

Comment 6

[Andrey ``Bass'' Shcheglov]

I have installed Mozilla v0.9.3 on a "netscape-clean" system and all prefs files
are new. This bug can be fixed neither by setting
user_pref("mail.fixed_width_messages", false);
in local (per-user) nor
pref("mail.fixed_width_messages", false);
in global preferences.

Comment 7

[Robert.B.Miller]

This "fix" did not work on my installation.
Mozilla 0.9.3 loaded on an "unclean" Netscape host (i.e., Mozilla did a profile
migration)
Chose Modern theme
Chose Display e-mail messages using Variable width font (checked prefs.js --
mail fixed width = false)
When viewing e-mail messages, font is displayed as fixed width.
To verify, go change monospace font in Edit -> Preferences -> fonts. Note that
e-mail format changes

This is NOT a problem using the Classic theme.

Comment 8

[Andrey ``Bass'' Shcheglov]

I recall this bug was present in v0.9.3 with Modern theme, but there were no
problem with Classic one.

Later, it seemed to disappear in vv0.9.4-0.9.5, though *here* it is not marked
as RESOLVED.

And today... I download a nigtly build (v0.9.5+.2001111303) and find that the
problem still persists in Classic theme - messages are displayed in monospaced
font, unless they're in flowed format (and all working properly in Modern theme).
It looks like this nightly bug is the exact opposite of what was in v0.9.3.

Comment 9

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

This bug doesn't seem to be the only one which is exactly the opposite wrt
modern <-> classic theme.  Look at this bug about the yellow smiley inside
Preferences window:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77285#c22

Comment 10

[Cliff Palmer]

Problem confirmed in my NT4, SP6 0.9.6 version.  Previous Moz versions (0.9.1,
0.9.2, 0.9.3, 0.9.5) rendered messages properly as specified in preferences, but
0.9.6 renders all messages with settings such as:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

in monospaced font only.

Comment 11

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

is this a dup of bug 90792?

Comment 12

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Teng-Fong Seak: is there any reason to keep this old bug open?  It appears to me that the preference is working for all text/plain messages I have, whether f=f or not and whether in ASCII, 8859-x, Hebrew or Cyrillic.

Comment 13

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

No response from reporter   =>  WFM