Work around incorrect email collapsing in Outlook.com web mail

Review Request #10438 — Created March 3, 2019 and discarded

Information

Review Board
release-3.0.x

Reviewers

When receiving an email with replies to a review, Outlook.com web mail in
conversation view hides most of the message. Everything after the first
table (containing "This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
http://<url>") is hidden. To show the full email, one has to click on the "..."
link that outlook inserts after the first table. Something which quickly gets
tedious.

Changing "wrote" to "commented" seems to avoid this problem. Presumably "wrote"
triggers outlook to consider the text to be from a previous email and hides it.

Keeping the last "wrote", just before the review request part to allow
collapsing of that.

Tested repying to a review, both to the top comment and to an issue, and verified that the mail received in the web mail on outlook.com isn't collpased when this patch is applied. Without the patch the email gets collapased.

Summary ID
Work around incorrect email collapsing in Outlook.com web mail
When receiving an email with replies to a review, Outlook.com web mail in conversation view hides most of the message. Everything after the first table (containing "This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit: http://<url>") is hidden. To show the full email, one has to click on the "..." link that outlook inserts after the first table. Something which quickly gets tedious. Changing "wrote" to "commented" seems to avoid this problem. Presumably "wrote" triggers outlook to consider the text to be from a previous email and hides it. Keeping the last "wrote", just before the review request part to allow collapsing of that.
52b06c6956cb6f33a136186674b00e36242443bb

Description From Last Updated

This is sort of hilarious and sad, if this is truly the cause. Just to sanity-check, does this manifest if …

chipx86chipx86
erijo
chipx86
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    This is sort of hilarious and sad, if this is truly the cause.

    Just to sanity-check, does this manifest if the very first e-mail in the thread is a reply? (You could test by disabling e-mail, creating a review request and reviews, and then re-enabling e-mail before replying). I'm just curious if there's any heuristics involved on the Outlook side for this.

    I can't find any information on how Outlook chooses to collapse these e-mails, and I suspect that this behavior is subject to change anyway.

    1. I agree that it is rather sad, and I fully understand if this is too much of a hack for you to accept.

      With that said, I have attached two new screenshots where I created a new review request and added a new review with email disabled. I then enabled email and made a reply to the review. One screenshot is made without the fix (i.e. using the release-3.0.x branch from today) and the other is using release-3.0.x + this fix.

      As can be seen in the w/o fix screenshot, outlook displays the whole email in the "message history" view and the message itselfs contains nothing but the "This is an ..." box at the top.

      In the w/ fix screenshot the message contains the reply (as expected).

    2. Any idea on how to proceed with this?

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erijo
erijo
  1. Ping on this one as well. As I've said before, if you think this change is too weird I'm happy to drop it (and we'll just apply it ourselves).

  2. 
      
erijo
Review request changed
Status:
Discarded
Change Summary:

Probably too weird to be of general interest.