Hi all,
Does anybody know how to stop the Gmail webmail frontend from corrupting sequences of space characters in preformatted text?
When replying to a plaintext mail, Gmail seems to turn every second space into an ISO8859-1/Unicode non-breaking space character (U00A0). This seems to be a workaround for broken mail readers which would incorrectly collapse spaces in implicitly fixed-format text in received messages. Unfortunately, it's also an effective workaround for correct behaviour by properly-implemented mail clients. Direct replies via SMTP to smtp.googlemail.com don't get destroyed in this way, unless a broken client is used is used to generate the reply.
This seems to be the cause behind patch discussion threads turning, sooner or later, into a mass of ? characters (this is what some agents like Mutt squash non-ascii characters to when quoting the original message in ascii plaintext replies -- this compounds the problem but is not the root cause -- the text is already badly damaged by this stage).
See: * http://www.ieft.org/rfc/rfc2646.txt * http://lists.luv.asn.au/pipermail/luv-main/2011-November/000580.html
Apart from "never reply to patches via webmail", does anyone know a workaround?
Cheers ---Dave
----- Forwarded message from Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org -----
MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.52.19.176 with HTTP; Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:31:28 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: 20120321153006.GA2064@linaro.org References: 20120321153006.GA2064@linaro.org Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:31:28 +0000 Delivered-To: dave.martin@linaro.org Message-ID: CA+wbFdezDj3J8zsUMjZ4bky6C6dHdGJVnAwxFDfiN7-JKrsPdA@mail.gmail.com Subject: Re: Gmail test From: Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org To: Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Can Gmail do it ... ?? Come on!
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org wrote:
two spaces
preformatted text is a pain
Not much help but the going work-around is to not use the webmail interface for this and use mutt, thunderbird, etc. via imap and smtp. The added advantage there is you can add extensions to linkify bugs and such for places like launchpad, bugzilla, etc..
J
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 9:55 AM, Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org wrote:
Hi all,
Does anybody know how to stop the Gmail webmail frontend from corrupting sequences of space characters in preformatted text?
When replying to a plaintext mail, Gmail seems to turn every second space into an ISO8859-1/Unicode non-breaking space character (U00A0). This seems to be a workaround for broken mail readers which would incorrectly collapse spaces in implicitly fixed-format text in received messages. Unfortunately, it's also an effective workaround for correct behaviour by properly-implemented mail clients. Direct replies via SMTP to smtp.googlemail.com don't get destroyed in this way, unless a broken client is used is used to generate the reply.
This seems to be the cause behind patch discussion threads turning, sooner or later, into a mass of ? characters (this is what some agents like Mutt squash non-ascii characters to when quoting the original message in ascii plaintext replies -- this compounds the problem but is not the root cause -- the text is already badly damaged by this stage).
See: * http://www.ieft.org/rfc/rfc2646.txt * http://lists.luv.asn.au/pipermail/luv-main/2011-November/000580.html
Apart from "never reply to patches via webmail", does anyone know a workaround?
Cheers ---Dave
----- Forwarded message from Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org -----
MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.52.19.176 with HTTP; Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:31:28 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: 20120321153006.GA2064@linaro.org References: 20120321153006.GA2064@linaro.org Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:31:28 +0000 Delivered-To: dave.martin@linaro.org Message-ID: CA+wbFdezDj3J8zsUMjZ4bky6C6dHdGJVnAwxFDfiN7-JKrsPdA@mail.gmail.com Subject: Re: Gmail test From: Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org To: Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Can Gmail do it ... ?? Come on!
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org wrote:
two spaces
preformatted text is a pain
-- Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org Linaro Kernel Working Group
-- http://www.linaro.org/ -- Open source software for ARM SoCs
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Linaro http://twitter.com/#%21/linaroorg http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog/
----- End forwarded message -----
linaro-dev mailing list linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 10:06:54AM -0600, Joey STANFORD wrote:
Not much help but the going work-around is to not use the webmail interface for this and use mutt, thunderbird, etc. via imap and smtp. The added advantage there is you can add extensions to linkify bugs and such for places like launchpad, bugzilla, etc..
I can use mutt for that ... it's training everyone _else_ to do it that might be a problem ;)
For now, I might wrap my editor with a script that restores those bogus sequences to the two spaces they started out as in the first place... but it's a bit of a hack.
Cheers ---Dave
I had this happen as well, when using gmail in Chromium for things that I would cut and paste; however, it did not happen in Firefox. The way I worked around it was to use Firefox or barring that I would save the email as a draft, open it back up fix the spaces, then resave as a draft and view it again to make sure the formatting didn't disappear. (however that was a pain). I spoke to the Google guys about this at Connect, they said they were aware and working on a fix, but that's about all I know at the moment.
Cheers, Amber
On 21 March 2012 12:06, Joey STANFORD joey@linaro.org wrote:
Not much help but the going work-around is to not use the webmail interface for this and use mutt, thunderbird, etc. via imap and smtp. The added advantage there is you can add extensions to linkify bugs and such for places like launchpad, bugzilla, etc..
J
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 9:55 AM, Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org wrote:
Hi all,
Does anybody know how to stop the Gmail webmail frontend from corrupting
sequences of space characters in preformatted text?
When replying to a plaintext mail, Gmail seems to turn every second
space into an ISO8859-1/Unicode non-breaking space character (U00A0). This seems to be a workaround for broken mail readers which would incorrectly collapse spaces in implicitly fixed-format text in received messages. Unfortunately, it's also an effective workaround for correct behaviour by properly-implemented mail clients. Direct replies via SMTP to smtp.googlemail.com don't get destroyed in this way, unless a broken client is used is used to generate the reply.
This seems to be the cause behind patch discussion threads turning,
sooner or later, into a mass of ? characters (this is what some agents like Mutt squash non-ascii characters to when quoting the original message in ascii plaintext replies -- this compounds the problem but is not the root cause -- the text is already badly damaged by this stage).
See:
- http://www.ieft.org/rfc/rfc2646.txt
- http://lists.luv.asn.au/pipermail/luv-main/2011-November/000580.html
Apart from "never reply to patches via webmail", does anyone know a
workaround?
Cheers ---Dave
----- Forwarded message from Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org -----
MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.52.19.176 with HTTP; Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:31:28 -0700
(PDT)
In-Reply-To: 20120321153006.GA2064@linaro.org References: 20120321153006.GA2064@linaro.org Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:31:28 +0000 Delivered-To: dave.martin@linaro.org Message-ID: <
CA+wbFdezDj3J8zsUMjZ4bky6C6dHdGJVnAwxFDfiN7-JKrsPdA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Gmail test From: Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org To: Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Can Gmail do it ... ?? Come on!
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org
wrote:
two spaces
preformatted text is a pain
-- Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org Linaro Kernel Working Group
-- http://www.linaro.org/ -- Open source software for ARM SoCs
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Linaro http://twitter.com/#%21/linaroorg http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog/
----- End forwarded message -----
linaro-dev mailing list linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev
-- Joey STANFORD Engineering Program Manager Office: +1-303-800-6609
http://www.linaro.org/ Open source software for ARM SoCs
linaro-dev mailing list linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 12:20:22PM -0400, Amber Graner wrote:
I had this happen as well, when using gmail in Chromium for things that I would cut and paste; however, it did not happen in Firefox. The way I worked around it was to use Firefox or barring that I would save the email as a draft, open it back up fix the spaces, then resave as a draft and view it again to make sure the formatting didn't disappear. (however that was a pain). I spoke to the Google guys about this at Connect, they said they were aware and working on a fix, but that's about all I know at the moment.
It's reassuring that they're working on it.
I guess I can work around it in the meantime; I was just curious as to whether there was a known fix.
Thanks ---Dave
On 21 March 2012 18:20, Amber Graner amber.graner@linaro.org wrote:
I spoke to the Google guys about this at Connect, they said they were aware and working on a fix, but that's about all I know at the moment.
As paying customers is there a channel we can use to raise the issue?
Riku
I did actually. If anyone has any examples of the "plague of question marks" that we think are caused by this, let me know and I'll add it to the case.
On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 3:58 AM, Riku Voipio riku.voipio@linaro.org wrote:
On 21 March 2012 18:20, Amber Graner amber.graner@linaro.org wrote:
I spoke to the Google guys about this at Connect, they said they were aware and working on a fix, but that's about all I know at the moment.
As paying customers is there a channel we can use to raise the issue?
Riku
On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 09:18:36AM -0600, Joey STANFORD wrote:
I did actually. If anyone has any examples of the "plague of question marks" that we think are caused by this, let me know and I'll add it to the case.
Now I've had a chance to look into this, it seems that the plague of question marks actually seems to arise out of an interaction between Mutt and my unusual locale settings. Basically if your locale settings don't support the no-breaking space character then Mutt when quoting text for replies will default to a charset which doesn't have it, and will replace all non-representable characters with ?
So, it seems that this should only affect people whose mail client settings exclude modern charsets like ISO-8859-n and UTF-8 (in my case, this was an unintentional side-effect).
The way Gmail munges the whitespace in replies still feels wrong, but I can avoid the worst of the consequences with a local workaround to my Mutt config. This may affect a few other people out there with unusual settings, but not very many.
I think the "don't reply to patches via Gmail" is still good advice to follow most of the time, but it looks a bit less critical than I initially thought.
Cheers ---Dave
On 22 March 2012 19:31, Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org wrote:
Now I've had a chance to look into this, it seems that the plague of question marks actually seems to arise out of an interaction between Mutt and my unusual locale settings. Basically if your locale settings don't support the no-breaking space character then Mutt when quoting text for replies will default to a charset which doesn't have it, and will replace all non-representable characters with ?
So, it seems that this should only affect people whose mail client settings exclude modern charsets like ISO-8859-n and UTF-8 (in my case, this was an unintentional side-effect).
Yeah, most people these days don't seem to notice because their clients can cope with the non-breaking-space, but it's still pretty poor on gmail's part to be mangling the text in the first place (not least because it leaves you open to old-school email types who might choose to flame for quoted-printable). On the other hand I have gone at least a year replying to patches on qemu-devel like this without getting any complaints, so maybe all the old-school types have finally got a unicode aware mail client :-)
-- PMM
On Wed, 2012-03-21 at 15:55 +0000, Dave Martin wrote:
Does anybody know how to stop the Gmail webmail frontend from corrupting sequences of space characters in preformatted text?
Apart from "never reply to patches via webmail", does anyone know a workaround?
Have all the Gmail mail forwarded to your own server then use mail and web services of your choice? That's what I do ;-)
-
Amber Graner -
Dave Martin -
Joey STANFORD -
Jon Medhurst (Tixy) -
Peter Maydell -
Riku Voipio