Chat - Markdown entered in email responses don’t render in the app correctly

[kavimuru]

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Action Performed:

1. Send a message from userA to userB
2. Wait for the email containing the message to be received on email by userB
3. Respond to the email and include markdown in your response

Expected Result:

The markdown entered in the email response should render in the New Expensify app

Actual Result:

The message via email appears in New Expensify without markdown rendered correctly

Workaround:

Unknown

Platform:

Where is this issue occurring?

• Web
• iOS
• Android
• Desktop App
• Mobile Web

Version Number:
1.0.88-2
Logs: https://stackoverflow.com/c/expensify/questions/4856
Notes/Photos/Videos:

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[MelvinBot]

Triggered auto assignment to @flodnv (Engineering), see https://stackoverflow.com/c/expensify/questions/4319 for more details.

[isagoico]

I also tested this using the markdowns in Gmail and message displayed only the italic markdown. Also the Quoted text is not rendered in App.

• New Expensify:

• Email:

[MelvinBot]

Triggered auto assignment to @trjExpensify (AutoAssignerTriage), see https://stackoverflow.com/c/expensify/questions/4749 for more details.

[flodnv]

Nice shot @MelvinBot 😄

@trjExpensify I don't think we really want to fix this? Or if we do, I'd say low priority at best?

[trjExpensify]

We can mark this issue as external to be worked on by a contributor.

[MelvinBot]

Triggered auto assignment to @roryabraham (Exported), see https://stackoverflow.com/c/expensify/questions/7972 for more details.

[thienlnam]

I think this may actually end up being an internal issue since the way we handle email responses is through mailgun and this might be a case of us not parsing or converting the markdown into html

[trjExpensify]

Cool, if that transpires to be the case I can pull the job post down.

[trjExpensify]

No takers on Upwork yet, Melv.

[roryabraham]

@trjExpensify Please take down the Upwork job for this issue, then feel free to unassign yourself.

[chiragsalian]

Started working on this today. i was playing around with Parsedown to see if it would help us in this scenario. It has some limitations and as I continued working on it there is a chance we don't even need it. So basically i'm trying to understand our usecase, from the issue description it talks about markdowns i.e., special characters like ** or ~~ to determine the formatting. But from the very next example here its not markdown but those are just regular formatting options. Those are most likely just plain HTML that we're either stripping out when we shouldn't be or updating App to those elements.

Eg of markdown bold: *Test Me*
Eg of formatted style for bold: <b>Test Me</b>

If you bold a text in gmail we'll receive its formatted style. Our app currently does not recognize <b> and instead uses <strong> for bold.

So anyway I think we should not be looking at converting markdown from the emails and instead just allowing formatted email styles to show. Since the latter is more common and I'm not sure why would anyone send an email with markdown text. Let me know if that makes sense or if you guys feel differently.

[thienlnam]

My bad, my comment about parsing emails into markdown was not accurate

instead just allowing formatted email styles to show

We already do this mostly, we get HTML from emails but have to strip them of quoted content and images (since we process those separately and not inline) here.

Quoted content being stripped is expected for previous email replies but we may need to update our parser to only strip out previous email content instead of all quoted content

Our app currently does not recognize and instead uses for bold.

This is probably something we can add into expensimark

[thienlnam]

I was chatting with @chiragsalian about this 1:1 but I don't think we should support markdown entered in emails like the issue description mentioned. Instead, they should just use the included formatting that email providers allow. I think this Problem/Solution to this would be:

Problem: Formatting used in emails is not being formatted correctly in the app
Solution: Add support for <b> and <strike> tags in Expensimark

[chiragsalian]

Got a bit sidetracked due to other priorities and then I've been OOO this week cause I'm helping with the career fair. I should get back to this issue soon.

[chiragsalian]

Demoting to monthly since i'm focusing on other tasks while this still has n6-hold on it.

[chiragsalian]

Was focusing on other priorities. Now that my plate is clear i should get back to this soon.

[chiragsalian]

Fixed, I'm adding support for bold, italics, and strikethrough from emails. The changes were easier than I thought, I just had to update our react-native-render-html since support for bold was added recently. Italics always worked. Strikethrough was stripped in the backend so I'm allowing it now and react-native-render-html works perfectly with strike tags as well.

If there are additional styles needed we can add them in on a case-to-case basis.

PR in review.