[Bug 86423] Ability To Reply To HTML Email With Same HTML Format As It Was Received

[Thomas McGuire]

------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are the assignee for the bug, or are watching the assignee.
         
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86423         
Thomas.McGuire gmx net changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
          Component|general                     |composer



------- Additional Comments From Thomas.McGuire gmx net  2008-07-15 13:15 -------
As the current KMail maintainer, let me clarify a few things:

> I thought that with Kmail/KDE4, it would be possible to use the KPart from Mailody
Not correct. Neither does Mailody provide a KPart, nor does KMail support embedding KParts in the composer (see bug 59481).
However, KMail and Mailody share some infrastructure, namely KRichTextWidget and the signature editor, which brought improved HTML suppor to both apps (HTML signatures and links, for example).

There biggest reason why Mailody has support for replying to HTML messages is that is was way easier to implement in Mailody. First of all, Mailody doesn't support templates, which complicate things. Secondly, the KMail code for replying to a message sadly became complicated during the years.

> Why don't we put this feature in programs like Google SoC? 
See http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/Summer_of_Code/2008/Ideas#KMail
Either I put it there too late or no one was interested. Will try again next year if the HTML support doesn't get better in the meantime.

>Are we any closer, even by 1 line of code, than we were on the 2nd August 2004 when this issue got raised? 
Yes, the underlying infrastructure has much improved. See above why this is still not possible.
 
> I hear you with the manpower issue, but still, a giant amount of work has been done porting to QT4, it must have had quite a few devs come out of the woodwork to work on it lately. I thought that might be a catalyst for this. 
Indeed, much work has been spent to port KMail to Qt4/KDE4. The problem is that this was done only by few people, leaving not much time for features. The port actually introduced many bugs and regressions which needed to be tracked down and fixed, which takes much time.
 
> [...] or why spell checking cannot work in HTML
This is fixed in the KDE4 version.

> Why are people working on useless eye candy for KDE 4.0 when we don't have a  finished email application.
Everybody works on what they like to work on. Nobody is getting paid for it. People developing desktop shells would not magically switch to developing a mail application, why should they? Moreover, there'd been an outcry if KDE 4.1 had HTML reply support, but not support for moving applets on the panel because the Plasma developers worked on KMail instead...

> Good, at least GMail's web UI is working.
No, it adds HTML garbage to your comment on the web interface. Don't use HTML for replying to bugzilla messages.

And to the numerous comments claiming that HTML support is not wanted in KMail: I don't know where you get that from, it is not true. Ingo, the previous maintainer, stated in comment #19 that he is not against HTML, and I'm not either (in fact HTML support is a bit improved in KDE4).
And again, lack of time of the involved developers is a major reason why this bug isn't done yet.

And this discussion is indeed pointless. Please don't leave further comments ranting about this, it will achive nothing but spam the people who voted for this. In fact, I'll ignore all further comments.

If you have patches, and we'd welcome every help, please contact the kdepim mailing list.