Re: [PATCH] Documentation/email-clients.txt: clarify Thunderbird section

Randy Dunlap
2009-12-10T22:16:44Z

On Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:05:47 -0600 Chris Friesen wrote:

> On 12/10/2009 10:25 AM, Alan Jenkins wrote:
>
> > The RFC for format=flowed says that it should escape lines which start
> > with a space (by "space stuffing" - prepending an additional space). So
> > in theory it should completely break patches. And indeed it does
> > <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java-patches/2003-q2/msg00315.html>
> >
> > Using HTML preformat in current versions of Thunderbird appears to send
> > with a format=flowed content-type, and then violates the RFC by not
> > performing any space-stuffing.
> >
> > So if I look at format=flowed patch in my Sent email folder, I see that
> > the message viewer correctly strips the first leading space in each
> > line. I.e. it breaks if you use copy+paste to get the patch out of
> > Thunderbird (or any other format=flowed aware client). File->Save As
> > preserves the spaces though, allowing the patch to be applied.
>
> Hmm...I'm using Thunderbird 3 beta4, and it appears that when sending
> via the "preformat" mechanism it actually does perform space-stuffing.
> This is visible as an extra leading space when looking at the raw source
> of the sent (or received) email via ctrl-U.
>
> However, if one turns off format=flowed, but leaves wrap set to 72, then
> the html preformat works without having to set the wrap to 0.

Surely this help text needs to be updated. It's most likely
a moving target (how thunderbird acts, that is), but anything that
helps is good.

---
~Randy