Mozilla Thunderbird Presents Gap in Subject - Thunderbird does not compact /t into a space

[komputes]

Binary package hint: thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird Presents Gap in Subject. Thunderbird does not compact /t into a space.

This has always been an issue but recently I have compared the gap in email subject lines on one of my imap servers (Postfix -> Dovecot -> Thunderbird) to the lack of gap in email subject lines on imap.gmail.com, and I think there is something wrong with the mail server which adds spaces after a certain number of words/chars...

When I contacted my system administrator with this concerned his response was the following:
==
This is not a bug in the IMAP server. It's possibly a bug in Thunderbird. Taking a random email from your screenshot, the original header looks like this on disk.

| Subject: [Bug 179042] Re: Videos tear and "blink" when enabling compiz [AMD Feature #7647] [EPR#257833]

(Which is 'AMD\n\tFeature')

Other MUAs (including at least Mutt and Gnus) compact the \t down to a single space. I don't know RFC 2821 well enough to know off the top of my head if Thunderbird's behaviour is unequivocally a bug, but it's certainly unintuitive and I'd recommend you file a bug against it in Ubuntu.
==

The server which gives me this problem runs dovecot-imapd 1:1.0.10-1ubuntu5.2 on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Herron). My client is Thunderbird on 9.10 (details below) but this issue has been happening since ~2007 (that's when I noticed it) as far as I remember.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
CheckboxSubmission: 37b6e744530b0903e91adb26018991f0
CheckboxSystem: d00f84de8a555815fa1c4660280da308
Date: Thu Oct 15 19:36:46 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: wl
Package: thunderbird 2.0.0.23+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_CA.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-12.41-generic
SourcePackage: thunderbird
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-12-generic i686

[komputes (komputes)]

Just spoke to Hellow on IRC who tells me that using dovecot and thunderbird he did not have this issue.

His server runs on Debian Lenny which runs dovecot-imapd 1.0.15-2.3+lenny1.

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

So this is fixed in 1.0.15?

Regards
chuck

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Komputes,

Can you add an example mbox so I can try to reproduce this?

Thanks
chuck

[Fabián Rodríguez (magicfab)]

I used "save as..." to produce the example I just attached. To open it and see the problem, from command line:

thunderbird example.eml

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

I just tested the following, here is the email that dovecot receieved (1.0.10-1ubuntu5.2), my thunderbird client was the one found in karmic.

From chuck@xxxx Mon Oct 19 13:22:08 2009
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:22:08 -0400
From: chuck <chuck@xxxx>
To: chuck@localhost
Subject: test
        testadfadfadfdfadfkladjfadf
Message-ID: <20091019172208.GA4200@xxx>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.17+20080114 (2008-01-14)
Status: RO
Content-Length: 6
Lines: 2

this is a message

And got the following when using thunderbind:

From chuck@xxxx Mon Oct 19 13:22:08 2009
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:22:08 -0400
From: chuck <chuck@xxx>
To: chuck@localhost
Subject: test testadfadfadfdfadfkladjfadf
Message-ID: <20091019172208.GA4200@xxx>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.17+20080114 (2008-01-14)
Status: RO
Content-Length: 6
Lines: 2

this is a message

However the raw message source still had the \n\t in the tabs.

Was this what you were expecting?

Regards
chuck

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

I have attached screenshot

[komputes (komputes)]

@Chuck

Unfortunately I cannot post an mbox, but it seems that you may have reproduced this successfully.

I'm not too sure what you are asking, but I expect email to not have the \t or for it to be compacted to a space instead of a tab. This seems to be done automatically on the gmail server.

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

No I havent been able to reproduce this as per above or is it something I am missing.

Regards
chuck

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Komputes,

If you can check this against lucid that would be great.

Thanks
chuck

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Please re-open once you are able to re-test against lucid.

Thanks
chuck

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to review all reported bugs in a timely manner. You reported this bug some time ago and there have been many changes in Ubuntu and Thunderbird since that time.

Do you still see a problem related to the one that you reported using currently supported versions of Thunderbird and Ubuntu? Please let us know if you do and in which version of Ubuntu otherwise this report can be left to expire in approximately 60 days time.

Thank you for helping make Ubuntu better.

Paul White
[Ubuntu Bug Squad]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for thunderbird (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]