GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 575788
[prefer-plain] Plain text plugin shows sent HTML mail as attachment
Last modified: 2009-12-28 02:24:33 UTC
HTML emails sent appear only as an attachment, with no message body. This is problematic as microsoft exchange sends all non-plain text emails in this manner, effectively disabling the message preview panel. This has been imported from bug 470291 Expected result: HTML should be converted to text insofar as possible (perhaps like html2text). $ evolution --version GNOME evolution 2.22.3.1 Installed via debian "lenny". The message source is provided below X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5 Received: from IP([IP]) by MAILSERVER ([IP1]) via Exchange Front-End Server www.SERVER.TLD ([IP2]) with Microsoft Exchange Server HTTP-DAV ; Thu, 12 Feb 2009 01:41:50 +0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/11.3.6.070618 Content-class: urn:content-classes:message Subject: SUBJECT Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 TIMEZONE Message-ID: <USERID> X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: Thread-Topic: TOPIC thread-index: DATA From: FROMFIELD To: ADDRESS X-Evolution-Source: exchange://MYACCOUNT/ <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>EMAILTITLE</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <FONT FACE=3D"Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN = STYLE=3D'font-size:12.0px'>Dear colleagues<BR> <BR> This is a memo<BR> <BR> Many thanks<BR> <BR> Person<BR> -- <BR> SNIP SIGNATURE </SPAN></FONT> </BODY> </HTML> Other information:
When I try to send an HTML message from Evolution itself, then it works fine, I see the plain text part and the HTML part is as attachment. That's a correct behaviour (in bounds of bug #470291, of course). From your source above I see the message had been generated with exchange v6.5. The prefer-plain plugin works only with already created parts, mostly chooses the plain/text part from those included in a message in multipart/alternative part. Your message contains only text/html part, as you said. I do not think the prefer-plain plugin should convert html to text only because the sending client doesn't support plain text clients. The most can be to tell the user in a message body that there is no plain text part to show and that he/she can unfold the html attachment below (it means that in bug #470291 will be kept option to show html parts as attachments). The other option would be to show the html part directly, when there is no plain text part, but as I expect people setting prefer-plain for some security (or such) reasons, then it's not the possibility here. The other thing I'm afraid of is a complexity of the HTML part. Having proper decoder from HTML with tables in tables would be quite hard thing. Not that there are no similar filters in sources already, it only extracts a raw text from HTML, but it is here for nothing, when users would not be able to read the generated plain text part properly. Any ideas?
Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!