Closed Bug 6032 Opened 26 years ago Closed 26 years ago

MIME linkifier should be more aggressive

Categories

(MailNews Core :: MIME, enhancement, P3)

All
Windows NT
enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

VERIFIED FIXED

People

(Reporter: phil, Assigned: rhp)

Details

(Whiteboard: Can't verify all in 5.0 yet, but some basics verified.)

When libmime parses messages looking for links, it looks for fully qualified URLs such as http://www.mozilla.org or mailto:phil@netscape.com. Increasingly, people are leaving the URL schemes off and just sending www.mozilla.org or phil@netscape.com. I think we should make our linkifying code more aggressive, perhaps keying off "www" for web pages and "@" for email addresses. I don't know if there's a lot of danger of false hits here, but we could make this additional aggressiveness a pref if it seems dangerous.
Severity: normal → enhancement
Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
Target Milestone: M7
Status: ASSIGNED → RESOLVED
Closed: 26 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
I put some work into the code that turns plain text into links. In the past, we would only turn text into links if it was prefixed by the protocol (i.e. http://www.blah.com), but now we should turn the following into links: HTTP Url's like : www.netscape.com www.mozilla.org/index.html FTP Url's like : ftp.netscape.com ftp.mozilla.org/file.zip Email addresses like : rhp@netscape.com joe@user.com?subject=blah If you see weird behavior, please let me know, but I tested a bunch of variations so I tried to catch the most obvious cases. Note: We still do not do multiple link links correctly. This is a considerably harder problem and if I have the chance, I will look into it.
Target Milestone: M7 → M6
This was actually implemented in M6 so I'm going to change the target milestone to M6. This way, the bug will reflect that the enhancement was actually made into M6.
QA Contact: 4080 → 4112
laurel - can you help me verify this? Just try the few cases that Rich has indicated. More extensive testing will be done later after I write up a test spec for this feature. Thanks.
Here's my initial findings using may24 builds on linux and windows (still working on mac, am having other problems): this fix appears to be generally in, but there is much that can't fully be verified here. Here's what I'm seeing: 1. links appear translated from shortened formats listed by rhp in comments above for http,mailto and ftp, but only if the message was sent from Messenger 4.x (I used 4.51) to seamonkey. 2. as indicated above, nothing translated if the message was sent from 5.0 3. http and ftp links were verified as working in seamonkey when 4.x originated the message 4. mailto links could not be verified as they're not generally working in seamonkey yet 5. I did notice the translation of incomplete links such as laurel@netscape or www.foobar. Do we want to make it appear that this is a (complete) link by underlining it and changing it to link color (default blue)? I would think not, but let me/us know. This may be an issue for a separate bug. So concensus between Lisa and I is to leave this bug unverified until more is working in seamonkey link-wise. At that time we will verify for general cases and open any lingering spinoff bugs. Agreed?
Regarding (my) item #5 above about incomplete links, I see 4.x does translate such links as mailto:laurel@netscape or http://www.moozilla .
It sounds like it is "working" the way it should. Keep in mind, this link-afying will only be applied to plain text messages, not HTML messages. If you send plain text from 4.5, you will see the link stuff working. In general, this bug wanted the linkifier to be more aggressive. Will there be errors, Sure, just like we have had "errors" in the past by not recognizing www.netscape.com to be a URL. Also, if you send 4.5 a plain text email and put, http://www.x it will be linkifyed, even though it shouldn't. In general, it will do the right thing "most" of the time. - rhp
Whiteboard: Can't verify all in 5.0 yet, but some basics verified.
Same results on mac using may24 build
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
I'm going to mark this verified since the feature is working. Bugs found from more testing and from the items Laurel mentioned will be checked/filed later. Rich - do you plan to do have this linking done for html compose windows? Thanks.
You know, I was wrong...this does work for HTML email as well. - rhp
Product: MailNews → Core
Product: Core → MailNews Core
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