952798 - Setting Color of Text in a Reply is Sometimes Unavailable

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[registrations]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131216183647

Steps to reproduce:

Highlight a message in the inbox.
Click on "Reply" toolbar icon.
Add text to reply.
Highlight part of text to change to a different color (say, Red.)
Click text color icon on toolbar.



Actual results:

The color picker dialog FAILS to display resulting in inability to set a different color.

NOTES:
1) Source email being replied to is from a form on a website - e.g., the format is consistent each and every time.  There is no issue with odd formats coming in from disparate email clients - it's a single, consistent source.
2) Without rhyme or reason, one time it will work, another it will not.  Referring to Note 1, the only wild card here is Thunderbird.  The source of the email being replied to is consistent in received format and therefore not a factor in this bug.


Expected results:

The color picker dialog should always display when the text color icon is clicked.

Comment 1

[:aceman]

Does the problem happen immediately after you click Reply to the message? From the start of composing the text color is not working?

Or does it only start after composing for a while (e.g. 10 minutes) ? Do you have automatic save as draft enabled in your TB options?

Comment 2

[registrations]

Auto save is set to 3 min.  Not sure about timing.  It is noticed when composing a reply, but for all I know it might happen on a new email.  I typically don't color thing up except for one specific type of reply.  And I say "composing" but it's really just pasting in a standard reply using ClipMate (ClipMate is not the problem) and since the pasted material is coming in as plain text, I do a couple of things before sending the reply off.  Not a whole lot of time elapses between paste and send.  Only enough to add the name in a salutation, convert three plain text URLs to actual links, then bold and color a couple of things.  Done, Send.

Comment 3

[:aceman]

Yes, then try to observe whether the small tweaks to the text in TB take you more than those 3 minutes. After the messages is autosaved (to drafts) the text color button stops working. Is that the problem?

Comment 4

[registrations]

I just tested several different ways.  Doing somethings before, somethings after, and waiting for an auto save to appear in Drafts, but it never misfired. I don't know what's triggering this, but I tried this test by replying to an email from someone for which the reply wouldn't let me color some text the other day.  Now it is.  It could be this fails after actions performed at some earlier point in a Thunderbird session that I am totally unaware of.

Comment 5

[:aceman]

Yeah sorry, autosave does not cause the problem. Yes, actions earlied in TB may cause it. Like Sending one message, then next one will have text color disabled.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Steve, can you reproduce this?

Comment 7

[sfhowes]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #6)

Steve, can you reproduce this?

I can't reproduce this in W10, and I no longer use W7. Problems setting text colors are usually caused by incorrect Colors settings, e.g. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1319039

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

David, can you reproduce this on win7?

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks Steve