Line breaks in quoted text (prefixed with ">") get realigned -- WhY?
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Hi! I realized that Enigmail signatures change linebreaks in text which is prefixed with ">", e.g. something like
.> A short line.
.> A short line.
.> A short line.
.> A short line.
.> A short line.
becomes
.> A short line. A short line. A short line. A short line. A short
.> line.
(without the leading ".", which is only there since sourceforge has similar issues).
More often than not, this cripples some structure of the quoted lines, e.g. if it was supposed to resemble code or a tabular. Worse, the modification happens during sending, when it's too late to fix it.
The problem goes away if I activate PGP/MIME, which makes me think that this effect is unavoidable for inline signatures. Yet I'm wondering why. gpg itself doesn't treat lines starting with ">" special, and Thunderbird won't touch them either when unsigned messages are sent.
Is this really needed for inline signatures? Unfortunatelly, sometimes PGP/MIME can't be used due to compatibility.
If Enigmail wouldn't do line wrapping, then Thunderbird would do it before sending the message. But this would break the signature.
You can disable line wrapping entirely by setting the options "mailnews.wraplength" (for plaintext messages) and "editor.htmlWrapColumn" (for HTML messages) to 0.
Ah, I see what you mean. But line wrapping should only affect lines longer than mailnews.wraplength. The example above shows lines which are apparently "too short". Without enigmail, Thunderbird wouldn't touch these lines. So I don't understand why they need "unwrapping".
Yes, you're right. Currently Enigmail does unconditional line wrapping. I'm working on a solution to only do line wrapping if at least one line longer than mailnews.wraplength is found. But Enigmail simply uses a standard TB-function for line wrapping; thus if such a line is found, the whole mail is re-wrapped.
Hey Patrick! Is it possible to fix that issue?
I love Enigmail and like to cite emails I'm answering a lot … ATM it's a little bit annoying to re-format the cited text … :-/
Thanks a lot and best regards! :)
This was true, when TB 17 was in use. In my experience, TB 24 improvements to rewrapping especially quoted text were quite successful and I never had an issue with Enigmail since then. Which Thunderbird version do you use?
Yes you are right! – Sry for my useless enquiry … :-/
Everything works like expected with TB 24.5.0. :)
Thanks and best regards
Thanks for your explanation. I can see the problem now.