When you call the mail compose window with an URL from the browser Edit | Send Page or Edit | Send Link menu item, and the default account is set to send as plain text, the URL should be enclosed in angle brackets <, >. See bug 27716 for the reason: otherwise, TXTtoHTML may not linkify the URL correcly on the receiving end.

A completely agree with zach (although 27716 was a bad example, it is already fixed). RFC2396 recommends this format. It makes recognition of wierd URLs possible or a lot easier.

trivial fix, here is the diff: Index: MsgComposeCommands.js =================================================================== RCS file: /cvsroot/mozilla/mailnews/compose/resources/content/MsgComposeCommands.js,v retrieving revision 1.73 diff -r1.73 MsgComposeCommands.js 240c240 < msgCompFields.SetBody("\n" + args.body + "\n"); --- > msgCompFields.SetBody("\n<" + args.body + ">\n");

the rfc say that angle brackets are often used as url delimitor but doesn't say that you must use it! extract from rfc 2396: The angle-bracket "<" and ">" and double-quote (") characters are excluded because they are often used as the delimiters around URI in text documents and protocol fields. The character "#" is excluded because it is used to delimit a URI from a fragment identifier in URI references (Section 4). The percent character "%" is excluded because it is used for the encoding of escaped characters. Phil, Jeff, any comment?

Doesn't matter to me. No standard requires or prohibits this usage. If people feel like it would improve things, go for it. The thing I don't want to see is the silly and verbose <URL: http://www.mozilla.org>

Ducarroz, Appendix E is the part of interest. <quote> In practice, URI are delimited in a variety of ways, but usually within double-quotes "http://test.com/", angle brackets <http://test.com/>, or just using whitespace http://test.com/ [...] Using <> angle brackets around each URI is especially recommended as a delimiting style for URI that contain whitespace. </quote> I thought, it was explicitly recommended, but at least I do. Our recognizer will stop e.g. at the first closing bracket, and some stupid websites use them (although strictly a violation of the standard) in their URLs. Example: <http://www.deja.com/[LB=http://www.mozilla.org/]/thread/%3c38B63CF2.7A661C3A@netscape.com%3e%231/1>. Stop guessing.

Thank for pointing me to the right paragraph. I will add the angle-bracket in plain text mode only as describe in my patch here above.

Fixed and checked in

buildid: 2001051708 linux, win98 marking verified, < > URL within the angle brackets with plain text compose sending url without < > for html compose