There are two modes. 'View' > 'Headers' > 'All' This will display all the headers. There will be a scroll bar to assist with viewing the lengthy list.

'View' > 'Headers' > 'Normal' This is a brief version which only displays the basics. eg: 'From', 'Subject', 'Reply-to', To, 'Cc' etc

However, you can use the 'Normal' mode and still have access to view headers via: 'More' > 'View Source' which will open a new window displaying the full details of the email.

As to your comment without obfuscation of the contents of said field.. in what way is it confusing or making it difficult to understand? As a general rule, it is not necessary to see the entire headers.

Toad-Hall said

As to your comment without obfuscation of the contents of said field.. in what way is it confusing or making it difficult to understand?

When the header view mode is set to "All", some fields, such as "Message-ID", "in-Reply-To" and others are still obfuscated. In other words, instead of seeing

Message-ID: blahblahlotsofstuffhere

you get

Message-ID: >1

Clicking on the "1" will expand the field and allow you to view it, but if you switch to a different tab and come back, it automagically reverts to the obfuscated display.

As you pointed out, there are more reliable ways to view the header info, such as simply selecting "View Source." We were just wondering of there was a value in the config file that controls this obfuscation when selecting the "View>Headers>All" mode.

BTW, we are running an ancient version of Tbird [3.1.20], if that matters at all.

Thanks in advance, Jim

PS Sorry if there is a lag time on our end of this discussion, lots of gators in our swamp here.

Hellooo??? [tap, tap] Is this thing on?

Anyone?

I've been trying to locate some info. The issue you describe does not occur in any of the versions I've used which is since version 9 and is now 45.3.0

Can you confirm you do not have any addon extensions which might be the cause?

Is there a reason why you are still using the rather old 3.1.20 version?

Toad-Hall, thanks for getting back to us.

As far as add-ons, the only ones are LookOut 1.2.13 [not likely to affect this] and Mail Tweak 1.0pre10 [deprecated, unfinished, and not supported, so therefore highly suspect]. However, Mail Tweak was only just installed recently, and our TBird install has been doing this thing since day one. Disabling Mail Tweak has no effect.

As far as why the ancient version, this is a Win NT 5 box, so the highest TBird version it can run would be 12.0 [or maybe 12.0.1].

Perhaps we will just install 12 and see if the behavior changes.

Thanks again for your help, I think you have done all that is possible. Unless somebody knows of a config value that might affect this, it will have to remain a mystery.

Jim, The Unrepentant Luddite

Toad-Hall, sorry to have taken an age to get to this thread. But had some time with no power following storms. Missed my invite to the All Hands in Hawaii as a result. Been most of the week getting back to normal really and this is a odd one.

I do recall seeing truncation of headers as described, but not recently. If I recall the ancient history the header was truncated using CSS if their was not sufficient space on the line for it to be displayed, clicking the link popped the information out into a tooltip bubble. The simplest way to get around that was increased the screen resolution so more characters per line can be displayed.

This bug lists all the changes in the header through linked bug reports. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=456814