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

Chris Friesen
2009-12-10T22:08:34Z

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.

Thanks,

Chris