[Kde-pim] KMail's quoting of text in replies and format=flowed

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Friday 31 October 2014 18:01:42 Jan Kundrát wrote:
> Hi,
> TL;DR: I've noticed that Laurent's and Christian's recent messages to
> this list are apparently created by prepending the original lines
> with "> ". This conflicts with RFC 3676, and results in Trojita
> treating the "> > something" as a block of text "> something" which
> is within a one-level deep quote. Such mails should be only quoted by
> a sindle ">".

(I read your entire message and not just the tl;dr.)

KMail doesn't know anything about "text/plain; format=flowed" messages. 
(Laurent's and Christian's recent messages are "text/plain" without 
Format specifier.) So, strictly speaking, KMail's quoting style does not 
conflict with RFC 3676.

Moreover, RFC 3676 reads
  If Format is not specified, or if the value is not recognized, a value
  of Fixed is assumed.

So, if Trojita wants to follow the RFC to the letter then it shouldn't 
treat KMail's messages as format=flowed messages. Of course, that's not 
what you want because usually KMail's messages are more flowed format 
than fixed format.

If you want Trojita to try treating text/plain messages without explicit 
Format specifier as format=flowed messages then that's great. But in 
this case you need to be forgiving in the quoting style used by the 
client which generated the text/plain without Format message. Even if we 
fixed KMail today, Trojita would still have to live for many years with 
messages created by old KMails.


Having said this, it would obviously be awesome to make some future 
version of KMail generate proper format=flowed messages. And in this 
case, of course, the user should not have the possibility to specify his 
own quote character. I suppose patches are welcome.


Hmm, looking at the "kdepim in KDE Applications 14.12" thread there's 
definititely something broken in KMail's quoting of quoted paragraphs. 
IIRC then that worked much better in the past (but that may just be 
typical "back in the days everything was better" romanticization). The 
thread is a nice real world sample for a unit test. :-)


Regards,
Ingo
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-pim/attachments/20141101/287c4078/attachment.sig>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
KDE PIM mailing list kde-pim at kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-pim
KDE PIM home page at http://pim.kde.org/