[MlMt] I don't expect support soon, but, heads up. (Yosemite)

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 5 Jun 2014, at 16:47, Sherif Soliman wrote:

>> I had to pull the test version. The fix has broken the display of 
>> plain text messages on Mavericks for several users. It works for me 
>> though and I haven't yet figured out what makes it fail for other 
>> users, but I'm looking into it.
>
> If this is going to prompt a rewriting of the decoding and 
> re/deflowing scripts,

It didn't :-)

> I'd like to bring up something I think I did once in the past.
>
> Replying to some emails (I think mostly ones sent from Gmail accounts) 
> always changes the text from flowing until it finds a newline 
> character to being hard wrapped to a certain line width. As in, it 
> introduces newline chars to make lines and paragraphs a lot shorter 
> than what the window width would make them, and they do not wrap 
> around as I resize the window. This also remains the case after the 
> reply is sent and I look at the reply message in browser.
>
> (I wanted to attach a screenshot, but Distortion mode doesn't distort 
> email body content apparently).
>
> I think Benny said that it was specific to replies to messages from a 
> Gmail account. A proposed workaround was to select all the text and 
> then reply, which for some reason did reflow the text as one would 
> want/expect. However, that workaround is a hassle, and it introduces 
> strange added empty lines/newline characters.

That strangeness is exactly why it's not the default behavior. The 
problem is that Gmail messages hard-wrap the plain text body part of a 
message. Every HTML message must have an equivalent plain text body 
part. This is what is used by MailMate when replying, because handling 
HTML is, in general, an error-prone heuristic game which is hard to win.

Note that when a user tells Gmail to send plain text only then the 
message is still hard-wrapped. This is, in my opinion, horribly 
primitive.

> Is there any chance that this is going to fixed in the near future?

I never promise anything, but it would be nice to improve because Gmail 
is ubiquitous (and I really dislike hard-wrapping). The best/proper fix 
would be if Gmail started to support `format=flowed`, but I asked them 
to do that years ago and I guess it's unlikely to happen. MailMate can 
work around the issue in three bad ways:

* Heuristically unwrap the plain text body part. Problem: Some times 
MailMate is going to unwrap something which shouldn't have been 
unwrapped.
* If present, convert the HTML body part to plain text. Problem: There 
is really no way to be sure how Gmail uses HTML and it could change at 
any time.
* A combination of the above. Base it on plain text and use the HTML 
text as a hint with respect to line wrapping. Problem: Non-trivial but 
probably the best approach.

If no HTML body part is present in the message then only the first 
option is viable. Option 1 would require some way to disable this 
behavior. Option 3 would probably be quite safe. None of the options are 
specific to Gmail, but could work for emails generated by other 
hard-wrapping email clients as well.

That's my thoughts on the issue. New ideas are welcome, especially if 
I've overlooked the obvious perfect solution.

> For the record, that problem did not happen in the reply to this 
> message.

That's because you replied to a message written in a proper email client 
which does not hard-wrap plain text ;-)

-- 
Benny
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