If Evo behaved as you want, you couldn't easily go back to HTML mode: after hitting "reply", the text part would be quoted, and if you go to HTML mode you would have htmlized text, but not the original HTML from the message.

If I want to reply using HTML I can select the HTML version and hit Reply. The fact is that someone who uses Plain as default, and views the original in Plain, is highly likely to want to compose the reply in Plain as well. The current setup makes them do extra work to obtain this, using a "feature" which looks more accidental than intentional and could well disappear in a future version.

The unambiguous rule should be: when replying to an HTML message use HTML, and when replying to a Plain message (or a Plain alternative of a multipart message) use Plain.

How do you select the HTML version before replying ?

My mistake, there doesn't seem to be a way to select HTML before replying (perhaps there should be). OTOH I sent myself a test HTML mail and was able to reply in HTML simply by hitting Reply and selecting HTML from the format bar. The HTML formatting of the original was preserved in the quoted reply.

*However* I'm rethinking my original report on this. The problem doesn't seem to be as simple as I thought. A multipart/alternative with Plain and HTML parts does work OK, i.e. the reply is in Plain. The problem arises when the parts are HTML and Rich Text, not Plain. If this is the case (I'll need to find some examples to check) then it's hard to see what else Evo can do as there isn't a Plain part to reply to.

Could this be solved by bug #481915, simply replying in the same format as is shown in the preview pane? I mean which part is used for quoting.

That would make a lot of sense, in that it fulfills the Principle of Least Astonishment.

OK, thanks, so I'm marking it as a duplicate of it, to have them on the same place.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 481915 ***