User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 - may be related to bug #155609 - When replying to a message, if you break a quoted line in two (eg. to comment on one sentence then continue on with the rest of the line as a new quoted section) and then try to requote the second bit, Mozilla silently adds a space in front of your > in the sent message, preventing it from being recognized as quoted text. I suspect this is by design but makes it a pain to coherently give a point-by-point reply inline with the original text. Currently, the only workaround is to 1) select the now-unquoted text, 2) cut, and 3) paste-as-quotation (for which there is no hot-key). This is substantially more effort than simply typing a >. Is this behaviour really necessary (eg. to protect a user from inadventantly typing a line starting with > that they don't intend to be quoted), and if so, could it be made disable-able? Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. start a reply 2. break up a quoted line 3. add > to the start of the 2nd half of the broken line 4. send message Actual Results: > blah blah blah Ginger blah > blah blah. I agree. {blank space}> yo yo yo {this line is NOT quoted} > wassup yo yo yo. No way! Expected Results: > blah blah blah Ginger blah > blah blah. I agree. > yo yo yo {this line IS quoted} > wassup yo yo yo. No way! issue found on a fresh install of final release 1.5 under Mandrake 9.1

The "space-stuffing" is part of Mozilla's support for format=flowed; see bug 168420 (and its attached FAQ) for more about that feature, including how to disable it. The specific problem you are encountering seems to be a dupe of bug 161968. There is a proposed solution there to simply automatically insert the > when the line is split. What I have found works (and what I have been told does not, so this may depend on other, unknown settings, or may be platform-specific) is to add the prefix character by using the arrow keys to navigate to the beginning of the latter part of the split quoted line, and then type the '>' -- it should be displayed in blue like the rest of the line is. If I type the '>' on the beginning of a line in the blank space area and then Delete characters until the split line comes up to join, I see the symptom you're complaining about.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 161968 ***