Problems Parsing Emails from Seamonkey

[jmana9]

I have a user who sends email through the built-in Seamonkey email client. When he emailed a message to my forum, the contents after the first line were indented and put into a quote block:

The message looks normal, with no indentation, in the HTML view:

When he tried to reply inline, things didn’t work well there either:

And here’s the HTML view:

If anyone would like to look into this, I will gladly PM the contents of the raw emails. This user is one of the most active users on our Yahoo Group who wants to continue to use email when we switch to Discourse, so I’m highly motivated to improve things for him - but I realize that probably doesn’t/shouldn’t translate to motivation on the development end!

[LeoMcA (Leo McArdle)]

@jmana9

When he emailed a message to my forum, the contents after the first line were indented and put into a quote block

I imagine this is the same whitespace issue as caused by Thunderbird:

@LeoMcA

I imagine what’s going on here is that somewhere in the HTML → Markdown conversion some whitespace is being added (or not removed) producing something like this:

    <img blah blah blah blah>

which is rendered like so:

<img blah blah blah blah>

@jmana9

When he tried to reply inline, things didn’t work well there either

Inline replies are pretty hard to process, see here:

Reply by email and inline replies

Recently, someone replied to one of my posts on our site, simply saying: Thanks, Dave. My comments are inline But that was it. On closer inspection, I noticed that the post was a reply by email. I clicked on the little email icon and saw the rest of what they had said, sprinkled in like: Thanks, Dave. My comments are inline On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 2:45 PM David McClure <ourforum@discoursemail.com> wrote: > dmcclure <https://www.ourforum.com/u/dmcclure> David McClure > <https://www.ourforu…

[jmana9]

@LeoMcA

I imagine this is the same whitespace issue as caused by Thunderbird:

Yeah, I had a feeling it might be. Do you know if the whitespace problem is going to be worked on?

@LeoMcA

Inline replies are pretty hard to process, see here:

It seems so, but since so many of our users frequently reply inline, and enough of them want to continue using email that I’m starting to worry that Discourse might not be a good fit for us if this can’t be improved. Our users have come to hate Yahoo Groups, but I can hear the comments now, “well if awful Yahoo can parse my emails properly, why can’t this new thing?” I wish we could get people to change their habits, but it’s a losing battle.

I really like Discourse, but if our users that prefer email stop posting because their messages don’t come through properly, that would be a big loss for our community.

[zogstrip (Régis Hanol)]

@jmana9

Do you know if the whitespace problem is going to be worked on?

It’s high on my todo list. I’ll work on it early October.

[jmana9]

@zogstrip

It’s high on my todo list. I’ll work on it early October.

Awesome, thanks for the update Régis! Let me know if you need help testing anything or if you need copies of troublesome emails.

Do you think improving whitespace parsing is likely to improve the handling of inline replies as well?

[jmana9]

Has there been any progress on this?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

It is still on our radar as a high priority item… work has been delayed a bit due to other urgent work.

[jmana9]

Thanks for the update Sam

[zogstrip (Régis Hanol)]

Finally got to it

This will be fixed once this PR is merged

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/9586