Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (6210 mails)

[Carl Hartung <suselinux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 02 October 2005 13:17, Chema Ollés wrote:
<snip>
> > so: do you type the signature "manually" or do you use a textfile?
<snip>
> "My separator" have a space at the end (you can see I write an *)
> Well,I use a text file.

Hello,

Thunderbird sends "text" e-mails in "format="text/flowed" format. This is a 
specialized markup designed to enhance the portability of text messages 
across a variety of platforms, display types and font sizes (think cell 
phones to PDAs to notebooks, and so on.)

Compatible e-mail clients *dynamically insert and remove trailing spaces and 
newlines* as needed to wrap text to match the display. It seems Thunderbird's 
"text/flowed" encoding mechanism likes to strip "excess" trailing spaces from 
outgoing e-mails, too. In my case, it was stripping the trailing space from 
the signature delimiter each time it appended my signature (a plain vanilla 
ASCII text file.)

By the way, to see this you have to 'cat' or 'less' an affected e-mail from 
the command line or open it in a proper text editor. Otherwise, Thunderbird's 
embedded "text/flowed" parser inserts the desired space dynamically when the 
file is opened and viewed natively.

I researched and tweaked and debugged this problem for over a week and got 
nowhere. I eventually gave up in disgust and switched to KMail. Case closed 
(here, at least) and I haven't looked back since. Of course, YMMV...

regards,

- Carl