990885 - HTML Mail Question Always Appears When Posting to Newsgroup

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Nathan]

Attachment: HTML Mail Question.PNG

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.154 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Used the "Followup" to post a message to a newsgroup.


Actual results:

I received the "HTML Mail Question" dialog.


Expected results:

It should have simply done what I have specified as my default preference and "Send the message in both plain text and HTML." There is an "Ask me what to do" option if I wanted to be asked every time. I don't have it selected, therefore it stands to reason that I don't want to be asked.

Comment 1

[Nathan]

Attachment: Send Options.PNG

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Nathan, your observation is correct.
Intelligent, user-configurable auto-detect of best delivery format for newsgroup recipients is not implemented, and there's a comment in the code acknowledging that.
I understand there are still newsgroups out there which do not accept HTML messages (omg).
So newsgroups recipients/accounts might be a different kind of animal which needs different treatment.
Different treatment needs new code, and UI. Which needs developer time...
But then, newsgroups is just a niche... :|

I'm currently working to tame message-centric Auto-Downgrade and recipient-centric Auto-Detect in bug 136502 and Bug 1222176, which touches the same area of code. Most people involved there have a pretty good understanding of that code.
If we can find something simple, like a single option in options UI to take care of newsgroups, somebody might pick this up. Probably not me, for reasons of time.

http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/compose/src/nsMsgCompose.cpp#4888

4888   // Right now, we don't have logic for newsgroups for intelligent send
4889   // preferences. Therefore, bail out early and save us a lot of work if there
4890   // are newsgroups.
4891   if (!newsgroups.IsEmpty())
4892   {
4893     *result = nsIMsgCompSendFormat::AskUser;
4894     return NS_OK;
4895   }

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

FYI. My Bug 1222176 seeks to remove "prefers-unknown" recipient scope from what comment 0 calls "Default preference" in send options. So user can define default preference for prefers-unknown (i.e. to map that to prefers-plain|html|both), and the old "Default preference" send option dropdown becomes a preference limited to recipient scope of "anyPlain", because only that case requires special treatment (like Asking, downgrading, send both etc.). So we can't simply cover newsgroup with revised preference for "anyPlain" scope, because that would wrongly assume that all newsgroups are prefers-plain.

I'm not using newsgroups so I'm not sure how they fit into the picture, and how exactly they work in TB.

Maybe we need another option similar to Bug 1222176:
Allow user to map "newsgroup-recipient" to any of prefers-plain|html|both, and then follow the general auto-detect logic. However, that would treat newsgroup same as email recipients, which does not seem right, because newsgroups might have different needs. Maybe they need their own send options page...
Would a global setting be sufficient, or do we need per-account settings (more work)?

Comment 4

[Henry Wilkes (they/them) [:henry-x]]

Bug 1727493 is going to remove the ask dialog. For newsgroups:

• If you compose in PlainText, send PlainText.
• Else, if you compose in HTML, but the message can be converted to PlainText in a non-lossy way and mailnews.sendformat.auto_downgrade is true, send PlainText.
• Else, send both HTML and PlainText (without consulting any user preference).

Comment 5

[Henry Wilkes (they/them) [:henry-x]]

Dialogue was removed in bug 1727493. The above comment 4 is not the same as what we finally went with. Instead, newsgroups will be the same as other mail:

• If you compose in Plain Text, send Plain Text.
• Else, use the selected option in "Options > Sending Format", whose initial value is set by the user preference "mail.default_send_format".