format=flowed woes in signature handling

[Nuno Monteiro <nuno monteiro paradigma co pt>]

Hi,

Mostly in a follow up to message 
<20011212200836.O15212@camera.vcsweb.com> by Gaelyne Gasson, where he 
says:

[quote]
"My only current curiousity is that something is mangling my butterfly - 
the X and O in the center line up in my signature file and appears 
correctly when composing mail  but when I view any mail I've sent these 
are no longer lined up."
[/quote]

I think I may have some insight on this, as this has happened to me as 
well. This bug appeared somewhere around version 1.2.1 or so, and has 
been there ever since. I noticed it a long time ago, but never actually 
got around to reporting it, sorry. So, cutting to the chase, it goes like 
this: I have the logo of the ASCII ribbon campaign in my .sig file, and 
it puzzled me somewhat that the first line that actually contained 
characters had an extra white space prepended to it. That reminded me of 
another bug that existed in most 1.1.x versions, where Balsa would _trim_ 
the whitespace from the beggining of the first line of the signature. I 
reported that in June, and it was eventually fixed in version 1.1.6. So, 
anyways, this case is quite different, Balsa is failling to handle white 
space on a line by itself, or whitespace in _the end_ of a line. Let me 
explain: I have the "Signature separator" checked off, and I have two 
empty lines in the beggining of my .sig file, before the signature text 
itself. Only today, after toying around a bit with the signature I 
noticed that the second of those two lines actually contained a single 
white space, instead of being empty (eg, instead of containing just a 
carriage return). So, I guess that Balsa is failing to handle that case 
and concatenates the two lines together, and thats why I end up having 
that trailing white space. If _any_ line happens to contain a white space 
as the last character, that line will be prepended to the next one. This 
is easily reproduceable, just do:

nuno:~$ echo -e 'foobar \nfoobar2 \nfoobar3 \nfoobar4' > .signature

Now compose a new message, and either postpone it or choose 'wrap body', 
and all the foobars will appear in one line. And now, for something 
completely different:

nuno:~$ echo -e '\n \n/~\\\n\\ /\n X\n/ \\\n' > .signature

Now, compose a new message. Choose 'Wrap body' from Edit menu, and mind 
the gap (cool, this is starting to sound like the subway in London) in 
the first line, mangling the ribbon. Thats because of the single white 
space in the second line. So far, so good. The message will look like 
this when I send it (well, alledgedly), right? Wrong! Now, the fun part, 
postpone the message, go to the draftbox and choose to continue. Behold. 
Uh-oh, something broke.

(wrap body)
  /~\
\ /
  X
/ \


(postpone + continue)
   /~\
\ /
   X
/ \

None of this happens if I uncheck Settings -> Preferences -> Mail options 
-> 'Reflow messages of type text/plain; format=flowed', though.

Well, thats it for now. I have some other nitpicks to report (nothing 
related to this, though), but I'm going to grab some dinner now, I havent 
eaten anything since lunch and my stomach roaring is probably heard in 
Madrid :) Bye for now!

  -- nuno

PS: btw, this is Balsa 1.2.3 from CVS, from a week ago or something.


  /~\ The ASCII        |  N u n o  M o n t e i r o
  \ / Ribbon Campaign  |  n u n o @ p a ra d i g m a . c o . p t
   X  Against HTML     |  P a r a d i g m a  W e b h o s t i n g , L d a
  / \ Email!           |  + 3 5 1 . 9 3 . 6 1 3 4 . 8 9 8