[imp] Question Marks and Carriage Returns...

cjdl01 cjdl01 at brokensolstice.com
Fri Jul 21 12:10:11 UTC 2017


Quoting cjdl01 <cjdl01 at brokensolstice.com>:

> Quoting Jens Wahnes <wahnes at uni-koeln.de>:
>
>> cjdl01 wrote:
>>> It seems that when we receive an email that is html (or html and  
>>> text) from *some* people, the email looks fine, until we hit the  
>>> "Reply" button in imp. Then the message suddenly is injected with  
>>> a bunch of extra carriage returns and lines with nothing but a  
>>> question mark on them.  It quadruples (roughly) the length of the  
>>> email, and makes it very difficult to read.  Some people are even  
>>> afraid that the email has a virus because it is malformatted
>>
>> concerning the empty lines, this *might* be emails sent by Outlook  
>> users that use HTML. Outlook's HTML is known to contain nonsense  
>> codes that causes lots of blank lines when replying (I think the  
>> root cause is some sort of empty line or paragraph that is supposed  
>> to have a line height of zero in Outlook but cannot be converted  
>> properly into the HTML editor Horde uses).
>>
>> If this is indeed the problem you are facing, you may want to try  
>> some code that Joao S Veiga shared on the Horde mailing list some  
>> 18 months ago:  
>> <https://lists.horde.org/archives/horde/Week-of-Mon-20160104/055263.html>
>>
>> The question mark thing, however, is not something I have  
>> encountered before, so I don't know about that.
>>
>>
>> Jens
>> -- 
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>
> Thank you.. perhaps I'll do that.. but the question mark thing is by  
> far and away the bigger problem. People are telling me that they  
> think there is a virus in the email because it is malformatted, and  
> emails are getting tossed without being read.
>
> Also, it is a real pain to read emails -- especially as they build  
> up in threads.  We could live with the extra lines, but the question  
> mark thing... that has to go.  I'm sure it is probably a UTF  
> thing... but I just don't know how to address it...
>
> This is what it looks like (except it is html formatted):
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Please find below the standard information that we will need to  
> analyze your financial situation:
>
>
> ?
>
>
>
> ????????? Most recent pay stubs for the last 30 days
>
>
>
> ????????? All W-2s for the last two years
>
>
>
> ????????? (2) Most recent bank / financial account statements  
> (checking/savings/retirement/etc...) All pages MUST be included.
>
>
>
>
> ????????? Last two years of Federal Tax Returns (all schedules  
> required ? Michigan returns not needed)
>
>
>
> ????????? Signed Borrowers Authorization form (attached to this  
> email as pdf file)
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
>
> In the original email, there were no question marks, and they were  
> single-spaced.  Looking through the email headers, it doesn't even  
> look like it was authored in Outlook (like I expected it to be).   
> Hitting "Reply" is what creates the mal-formatting.
>
> Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?
>
> Thank you.

I implemented Jens' suggestion, and it did help with the spaces, but  
as I feared, the question marks still remain.  I just don't know what  
that could be, but it is definitely related to Outlook.  I can  
replicate this over and over using Outlook.  If I use Outlook Web  
Access, however, this does not occur.  I suspect that is because  
Outlook hands off the formatting to word, and word is doing something  
non-standard...

the <o:p> tags were the culprit for the spaces, but I don't see any  
tags in the email that would account for the "?" characters...

I did open a bug on this... 14668.





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