[PATCH 0/2] Bug and potential fix: forwarded messages

[Adam Wolfe Gordon]

Hi everyone,

I encountered today a bug that I remember being mentioned on IRC where
some messages are shown in emacs as completely empty, even though their
content is present and simple. For me, the bug shows up with messages that
have been forwarded by an Outlook user who didn't add any content to the top
of the message. The first line of the message is "-----Original Message-----",
and the rest is the forwarded text. Notmuch tries to collapse the forwarded
content into a button, but fails mysteriously.

The first patch in this series adds a test (marked as broken) that demonstrates
the bug. I think this should be pushed regardless of whether my solution is
the right one. My solution is to check whether we're collapsing the entire
message before doing so, and avoid turning it into a button if that's the case.
I think this is a desirable behavior, since if someone has forwarded a message
without adding anything the user probably wants to read that message. But,
I'll admit that I didn't figure out the real cause of the problem, and I
would be happy to hear other suggestions.

It also occurs to me that this might indicate a bigger problem with how
notmuch-wash.el handles messages starting with "-----Original Message-----".
Notmuch seems to assume that this indicates the rest of the message is quoted
stuff that's been top-posted on. In my office this isn't necessarily the case,
since Outlook produces that line at the top of every reply, and it's up to
the user whether to top-post or not (and not everyone does).

I'll have to experiment a bit more to verify whether a problem (i.e. whether
Notmuch hides inappropriate things when someone replies inline with Outlook).
Someone please correct me if I'm missing something in how the code operates.

Adam Wolfe Gordon (2):
  test: Add broken test for showing forwarded messages
  emacs: Fix broken showing of forwarded messages.

 emacs/notmuch-wash.el |    5 +++--
 test/emacs            |   32 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

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1.7.5.4