Keeping colored text in Reply

If someone responds to my email by adding colored text to the end of each paragraph (rather than fully quoting), when I REPLY to them the color of the text changes so it's all the same and I can't tell my original text from their colored comments.

Is this normal? Is there a setting to change? Am I making sense?

Thanks,
Mad Dog

Yes, I agree that the original layout and format should be conserved when a message is replied to or forwarded. I have found that Pandora Mail often completely loses the layout and formatting when you insert text as comments/answers. Indeed, in lots of cases I found that the original message often gets transformed into a garbled mess (so I carefully close the message without saving/overwriting it in order not to lose the original message).

I suspect that Pandora doesn't properly handle some messages with lots of HTML that likely have HTML tthat's badly formed (doesn't observe the official HTML rules), which seems to be a problem with a fairly high proportion of messages. It's a big issue: some mail is crammed full with HTNL and Javascript and images/videos when I reckon that the messages should be fairly plain/straightforward and send recipients to web pages to goet all the jazzy stuff. ... Just my opinion, folks.

Another related problem I have is that with some emails (I don't know what clients they use but I suspect Gmail), when I reply their entire message "compacts" with no spacing or line breaks or paragraphs. I get kind of tired of being the outcast with email programs I like that don't handle things gracefully. This is why I moved from Eudora last year, to try to end this stuff.

Let's ask Brana to look into these aspects of editing/forwarding/replying the body contents of messages. Another one that I've found is that Undo often doesn't work at all, so I keep saving frequently so that I can go back to an earlier message version if Undo fails. My guess is that this occurs if message s contain malformed HTML (but I wou;dn't really know, one way or the other).

Brana tells me that at the moment his focus is on OAuth2, because 1st October is apparently when Microsoft will fully switch to OAuth2 on their servers, so let's give him some breathing space. ... Wild horses couldn't drag me back to the Eudora camp, so I'm keen on helping him improve Pandora. (Such as an occasional donation, see https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=9ZK4PXS46DVN2 )

I'd love to see these things cleaned up. While we're on the subject, one other thing that makes me little crazy is if I reply and try to delete a bunch of the quoted text. It may be a Windows thing, but most of the time I highlights and scroll and it won't scroll but one of two screen lengths where it should scroll all the way to the bottom of the text so I can delete it all (or most).

Windows 10 if that matters.

And I'm with you about not going back to Eudora. Too many years dealing with all the weird symbols in text and having clients ask why so much of my quoted text has garbage symbols in it. "I use an ancient cuneiform email program."

My experience is that some message bodies can be edited without problems, others with a few problems, . The worst case is that some messages are totally uneditable (the segments of the body appear all over the place instead of their original positions or even the entire body disappears from sight -- which is when I cancel out so that I don't lose any of the original message contents and layout.

Speaking as someone with a degree in computing and 40 or so years of programming experience...

The "proper" form of html is essentially a nested structure where smaller elements of text etc inherit properties set by the "parents" of those texts, eg a phrase might partly be formatted according to attributes set at the start of a sentence, those in turn inherited from the start of a paragraph, those from a set of related paragraphs, those from a section, chapter, etc.

If someone simply deletes most of the text (and markup) occurring before some item of text there's no chance that what's left is going to look "right".

When you look at the actual html (on a webpage) that's been "hand-crafted" it's usually quite ... elegant, with care taken over the structure and a minimum of specification of attributes. But html that is generated by programs attempting to make a page look more like it's been word-processed / desktop-published, with a particular "look", tends to be very long-winded. And that's because instead of the parent/child/grandchild structure being applied once, across the whole webpage, each tiny section tends to include the whole nested structure over and over again.

So for example every sentence might have ALL the criteria for surrounding spacing, font-choice, emphasis/bold etc, colour ... defined. Then the next sentence has it all defined again, and the next and the next. The advantage of that is that one can pluck any sentence out of its context and put it somewhere else and its formatting travels with it. The disadvantage is that there's lots of unnecessary duplication of attributes that haven't changed since they were first used.

But in what I just wrote the suggestion that definitions repeat for "every sentence" was arbitrary. It could just as easily be "every paragraph", or "every phrase (perhaps between successive punctuation marks), or even "every word". It would depend on how granular the programmer of the original program that generated the html thought the markup should be. And if the original author chopped and changed their mind as they wrote their text, possibly even the first markup would become messier.

There's a conceptual problem is editing formatted text. Suppose one copies & pastes a phrase from one part of an email to another. The phrase could either take its original formatting with it, or inherit the attributes of the surrounding text wherever it is pasted to. Neither option is "right" in every case. Worse, in one instance a user might want (say) the font and size to go with the text, but in another instance just want colour to go with it. How is a program meant to do what the user wants when every user will want different behaviours in different situations?