User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100205 SeaMonkey/2.0.3 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100227 Thunderbird/3.0.3 In a discussion in mozilla.support.thunderbird about bracketing URIs in messages, I cited RFC 3986 (Appendix C). I then described the use of the less-than and greater-than symbols (often termed "angle brackets"). My message contained the following phrase: the use of < and >. When someone replied and quoted my message, that phrase became: the use of< and>. The reply used Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100227 Thunderbird/3.0.3 Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Send an ASCII-formatted message to yourself, containing the phrase "the use of < and >." 2. Send an ASCII-formatted reply of that message to yourself, quoting the original message. Spacing around valid symbols in ASCII-formatted messages should not change.

This WFM with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.2pre) Gecko/20100315 Lanikai/3.1b2pre. David would you mind trying in safe-mode or trying on Seamonkey/Thunderbird Trunk ?

The problem occurred when someone replied to my message using Thunderbird 3.0.3 localized to en-GB, not in a reply I generated. I do not know what extensions that person had installed. Thus, I do not know if the problem was caused by the localization or by an extension. With my own replies, I cannot reproduce the problem either running Thunderbird in safe mode or running it in normal mode with all extensions disabled.

I also cannot reproduce the problem in normal mode with all three of my extensions enabled: Signature Switch 1.6.5 Compact Headers 1.1.7 Mail Redirect 0.7.4

Based on that I'm going to consider that this is an extension issue and close it invalid. David can you ping your correspondent and ask him to check his extensions - so the author of the extension can be contacted ?

Hi, it was me David was referring to. Here is a list of my extensions: Archive This 1.4.6.4 Attachment Sizes 1.0 AttachmentExtractor 1.3.5 Dictionary Switcher 1.1.5 Image Zoom 0.4.4 InfoLister 0.10.3 keyconfig 20080929 [DISABLED] Nightly Tester Tools 2.0.3 Open Long Url 0.2.3 [DISABLED] QuickFolders 1.8.7 Quicktext Pro 0.9.10.1 QuoteCollapse 0.8 Send Later 1.2.0.0 [DISABLED] Smilie Inserter 0.7.0 [DISABLED] Update Notifier 0.1.5.5 [DISABLED] URL Link 2.03.3 [DISABLED] Happy to help try and pinpoint the problem. Please advise what else (if anything) I can do.

Find the extension that causes the issue and tell the extension author about it.

Replies from Herb Eppel originally showed the problem. Herb kindly tested enough to rule out any of the Thunderbird extensions he installed. Stanimir Stamenkov noticed Herb's postings in the mozilla.test newsgroup and indicated that the mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed preference variable was the culprit, citing <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mail_and_news_settings>. I tested and found that Stanimir hit the nail on the head. My use of the phrase "the use of < and >." in the message quoted by Herb was near the beginning of a line. When Herb quoted it, wrapping did not occur near the phrase. I did not previously see this problem because I turn "format=flowed" off while Herb had it turned on. Thus, this is a problem with how Thunderbird handles the "format=flowed" attribute. Wrapping and rewrapping with "format=flowed" turned on should not affect the spacing around < and > embedded within a line of text. Further, it should not position an embedded > to make it look like the indicator of quoted text. Note that the default is for "format=flowed" to be turned on. The default for mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed is true. The default for mailnews.display.disable_format_flowed_support is false. Thus, the default is to create this problem. Reopening. Thanks to Herb and Stanimir.

Now let's try to find duplicates ;-) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=f%3Df as a nice candidate : bug 441020. while https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=flowed+format, nothing strikes me. Can you check the bug list david please ?

No, bug 441020 is not a duplicate. It specifically addresses what happens when the first character in a line is > and the line is not part of a quoted prior message. I was aware of that bug and avoid creating text with > at the start of the line. I did a search on all Thunderbird bugs that are Open, New, Assigned, or Reopened and that have "flow" in the Summary. The query resulted in 12 bug reports, including this one. From the summaries, I did not see anything else looking like a duplicate of this bug. Having a dial-up connection, I will not search further.

Duplicate of bug 519165 -> Core bug 448198.