On 3/12/24 13:09, Tim via users wrote:
Thankyou, I've seen those greater-than signs in a mail in this thread, but only in one and from what I see in mails on this list that I open I've only ever seen that once, since I installed F38 from scratch. I'm on F41 now and as I said that one mail is the first time I've seen that convention. I'm also on the Daily version of Thunderbird, so relative to what's in the Fedora repositories, I'm several versions ahead, so what I'm seeing is what other Thunderbird users will see when the repositories get to the version I'm on now, unless things have been proven to be defects.On Tue, 2024-12-03 at 09:15 +1100, Stephen Morris wrote:That's interesting. In Thunderbird I'm seeing things differently, depending on who is reply to threads I'm seeing the entire quote with a black line down the side and text in black, for other people I see a coloured stripe and the text in blue. For the quotes you are replying to I see a dark blue stripe and light blue text with your response in black. What is also interesting is that for to portion of your response I'm replying to, in this composition that quote has a dark blue stripe and black text.It's been a while since I've played with Thunderbird, and not with the latest version of it (obviously), but it was my understanding (after experimentation), that if: Thunderbird receives some plain-text mail, it'll do a HTML rendition of it to display it, as it sees fit. If it receives a HTML mail, the styling embedded in the message will dictate the formatting. When it comes to replying to either of those, it's going to be a bit hit and miss. Some other mail client's idea of HTML mail may be different from Thunderbird's, and could be difficult for Thunderbird to determine quotes of quotes from other content. If the HTML mail did the sensible thing and encased quoted text in blockquote, that identifies it as a quote. If the HTML mail just played silly-buggers with paragraphs, divs, etc, there's little clue as to whether that's quoted text or otherwise-styled content. It gets all the more messy if someone breaks into the middle of a slab of quoted text, to reply, but doesn't sufficiently create a clearly obvious break. This chaotic mess is yet another reason, in the very long list of, why HTML is frowned on in certain circles (particularly mailing lists). For a long time there has not been a standard way to do HTML mail. Plain text, on the other hand, has had some well established techniques. Quoted text gets a greater-then sign prefixing it (occasionally another symbol, but only the greater-than and pipe symbol gets wide recognition). Quotes of quotes get another one stacked against it, and so on, and so forth.
Any mail client that still gets that wrong, and many do, has bad coding. Evolution frequently does. I nearly always have to hand-edit quoted text to unscramble the mess it would otherwise leave. Forté Inc's Agent (a Windows usenet client that also did mail), was the only one I ever came across that did it without any screw-ups. Ritlab's The Bat! was the only other mail program I used on Windows that could do email without looking like a dyslexic 10 year had coded the program. The mail program, or you, should be able reflow the text beside the quote indicators without it stupidly scrambling the greater-than symbols into the middle of the text. Without mixing up the quotes of quotes, into a single generation quote, and into the replies... But so many of them are just utterly crap at doing their job. Evolution appears to create all posts using HTML, but will convert it to plain text when sending it, if you set your options for plain text. You can see this in the manner that the editor works while typing in the message editor, and if you save a draft. Every now and then it'd do a spectacular cock-up where deleting one word would also remove everything else below it. Or you'd be unable to remove a line break that ended up in a stupid place.
I'm not sure how Evolution does its thing as I've never used it. If I had the time to invest in setting up a mail system I would still be using Lotus Notes.
Another pet hate with email over the last quarter century was mail clients that just can't get line wrapping right, and would turn messages into *this* kind of stupidly folded lines where there was a long line and a short overflow onto the next line, followed by another long line, ad infinitum, when quoting someone. It's a sodding bastard to read. Learn to code properly when you write email software, and either learn to properly wrap lines of text, or *don't* rewrap it.
Yeah, I have seen a mail package do that, but I have also seen people deliberately format their mail that way and had to reformat the text when moving it out of the mail, eg: when moving the text into excel to server as instructions on what should be done in the form environment being exposed by the excel workbook.
regards,
Steve
Attachment:
OpenPGP_0x1EBE7C07B0F7242C.asc
Description: OpenPGP public key
Attachment:
OpenPGP_signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
-- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
