Not much has changed in 17 years, but the observant amongst you will have noted that other email clients are now also using <blockquote type="cite">.  Notably, iOS (or whatever puts “Sent from my iPad/iPhone” at the end of every message) has been for a while now.  There are probably others too.

GMail doesn’t, however; it uses class="gmail_quote" (useless to anyone else); but it does apply some inline styles to present the quote visually in much the same way (support for CSS in <style> elements, in many email clients, particularly web-app-based, is still poor here in 2019).

Many of the arguments for changing this have now evaporated

[13 years ago]

And since no other mailer uses it (to my knowledge, I may be wrong here), I really doubt we would break a lot by removing it.

type="cite" is only us too, hopefully just currently.

A bit of hope has gone a long way!

[8 years ago]

Are you straight ignoring the fact that mails using type="cite" for quoting are plain unreadable in other mail clients? Do you think Thunderbird and its users exist in a separate reality where only its ways matter?

Simply removing type="cite" or replacing it with a class wouldn’t have improved the readability in other mail clients anyway.

Can we now close this as ‘WONTFIX’?

Perhaps not quite.

The original W3C standards were defined based upon what was common practice.  There is therefore an argument for proposing that the type attribute for <blockquote> be put on a standards track as it is now common practice (there should probably be a defined alternative, default value, perhaps none).  Apple (and perhaps others, even Google) should have a vested interest here.

The Firefox browser (70.0.1 at present) still has CSS rules for blockquote[type="cite"] (so the required formatting is applied even for outlook.com users if they are using Firefox as their browser).

Getting this adopted as a W3C standard would solve the perennial problem:

people using Outlook complain that my replies are hard to read.

Yes, Outlook ignores it, although it would be trivial for them to apply some CSS to msgs which style it properly

So I think it should be pushed forward as a standard before this ‘bug’ can be finally closed…

‘Necro’

PS. type="cite" might also be useful semantically more generally, not just for email, but, e.g., for bulletin-boards and other more modern social media to indicate that the source of the quote is within the very same thread...

I am using Thunderbird together with Microsoft's cloud email server in a corporate environment (Outlook etc.). It just came to my attention, that other people can hardly understand my replies if I don't do TOFU or mark my replies with colors etc.

I am shocked to see that I stumbled across a 20 years old bug. I could now curse about M$ and how they handle the blockquote tag. But the bottom line is that Thunderbird is sending emails that major systems from the corporate world don't display my emails correctly. I should add that gmail is also not displaying their usual grey bar on the left side when displaying replies written with Thunderbird. So now it's actually two major players.

From a user's perspective, the discussion about standards is somewhat academic. Users just want their emails to be readable by others. How can we get there?

Reading the discussion here, I'm beginning to feel like the standard is flawed to some degree.

Making CSS rules for blockquote type=cite to be some sort of standard may help. But it's only a longterm solution, and it's coming way too late.

So what now? How can we get to the point where replies written with Thunderbird are readable to others?

Many email clients including Gmail and Apple used <blockquote type="cite"> to quote replies and also style such in displayed messages similar to how Thunderbird does. Apple maybe still does, but Google has dropped the type="cite" attribute (which I have never found documented anywhere) in favour of explicit inline styles.

Google still uses blockquote but explicitly styles it class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" and no longer includes type="cite".

Thunderbird should do something similar.

The latest email I received from someone's iPhone has the same issue as Thunderbird. Their X-Mailer is iPhone Mail (19F77) - I don't know if that's up-to-date.

I am shocked to see that I stumbled across a 20 years old bug.

At the time of reporting, is was surely an 'undocumented feature' used by everyone apart from Microsoft. Which is ironic, because it's usually the other way round. But, only recently is this being sorted out.

But the bottom line is that Thunderbird is sending emails that major systems from the corporate world don't display my emails correctly.

AppleMail/iPhone/iPad is also sending emails that major systems from the corporate world don't display correctly, though that doesn't excuse it.

Making CSS rules for blockquote type=cite to be some sort of standard may help. But it's only a longterm solution, and it's coming way too late.

AFAIK, the type attribute was never a standard in the first place. Default user-agent CSS rules are only ever a recommendation rather than standard. Usually for blockquote it is just indented, though Firefox (and Thunderbird) put the blue bar on the left if type=cite is also present, and IMO this would be a better default for blockquote generally.

How can we get to the point where replies written with Thunderbird are readable to others?

As a workaround, you can put some CSS in your signature (make sure you have HTML signature enabled):

<style type='text/css'>
blockquote[type='cite'],
blockquote {
  margin: 1em 0 1em 0.5em;
  padding: 0 0 0 0.5em;
  border: 0;
  border-left: 2px solid #f70;
}
</style>