Nylas-mail: Quoted Text: Previous content doesn't get hidden in Threads because of Signature

[manas-chaudhari]

Earlier, in email threads, while reading any email, the content of previous emails used to get collapsed and a button was shown saying something like Show Previous.

Now, for emails in my organisation, this is not happening. So, by default, everything is expanded. As a result, email threads are unusable when they grow long, as in every message, content of all previous messages is shown.

In emails that are sent by me, this issue doesn't happen. Why could this be happening in other emails and how can this be fixed?
My guesses:

• Signatures
• There is a company wide signature which gets added in any email sent in the organisation.

Other Info

• [x] Are there any related issues?
  
  
  
  • https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/160
  
  
• [x] What operating system are you using?
  
  
  
  • OSX Yosemite
  
  
• [x] What version of N1 are you using?
  
  
  
  • 0.4.9-575c091
  
  

Bug?

• [x] Do you have any third-party plugins installed?
  
  
  
  • No
  
  
• [x] Is the issue related to a specific email provider (Gmail, Exchange, etc.)?
  
  
  
  • Could be related to organisation signature settings in Gmail as indicated above
  
  
• [x] Is the issue reproducible with a particular attachment, message, signature, etc?
  Try to provide an example as a file attachment or a screenshot.
  
  
  
  • This looks exactly like when quoted content is shown by clicking on Show Previous. The Hide Previous button isn't visible though.
  
  

[emorikawa]

@manas-chaudhari Thanks for reporting this. I think your hunch is correct. The signatures are messing up the quoted text detection. We've seen this occasionally as well.

Unfortunately there's not an easy fix for this. Offending emails tend to look like the following:

My reply

On Jan 3, 2016 Some Person wrote:
Foo
Bar

-- Malformed Signature of Some Person
Company Name

Instead of:

My reply

On Jan 3, 2016 Some Person wrote:
Foo
Bar

-- Correct Signature of Some Person
Company Name

The issue is that the malformed signature is placed outside of the quoted region. Unfortunately that looks nearly identical to a completely legitimate instance when you want to add an inline reply to the quoted part at the end of the text like the following:

My reply

On Jan 3, 2016 Some Person wrote:
Foo
Bar

-- Yeah! That's a good point or some other inline reply

In the latter case we don't want to fold the text.

It turns out that it is very difficult to determine what is a signature and what isn't. Since we've found inline replies to be far more common than mail servers who mangle signatures, we currently opt to keep messages expanded in this case. We are thinking about ways to deal with this, but it is likely going to be a longer-term project for our backend sometime in the future.

[manas-chaudhari]

This functionality is hindering my use a lot.
In my case, I am ready to sacrifice inline replies to force content to hide.
How can I go about doing a temporary fix?

Should I change the main source OR can a plugin be created to change this behaviour?

[alchzh]

How does Gmail do it then? Malformed sigs work fine with Gmail.

[rahulghanate]

I am facing the similar issue.
The signature by Google groups is added at the end of each email,
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "XXXXX" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

I am using N1 0.4.25 on Ubuntu 14.04

[quinn]

Has anyone tested the parameters of this functionality in gmail? For example, does gmail just assume anything coming after a quoted text is always a signature and hide it? Or does gmail have some magical "signature detection" algorithm?

[glen-ford-humanify]

I just want to upvote this. If I were a better programmer, I'd try to write a plugin. As it is, I'm thinking of hiding div.gmail_quote in my custom theme (if that's even possible). That would have some negative side-effects, but overall would greatly increase usability and send me less often to Gmail directly.