Hi Everyone, after being open for so many years and with little traction, I'm closing this issue as we cannot see ourselves implementing this in the foreseeable future.

Hello Gurleen,

Our instance is experiencing this issue as well:

• Embedded images and links are missing from the HTML email format.

Is there an update on the resolution of this issue?

Regards,

Jason Brison
Research In Motion, Ltd.

Embedded images and links appear to be missing from the HTML email format as well.

Hi Rob,

My comment was meant as supporting evidence that this task is doable and not blocked by possible security issues.

But I now have experience with using Confluence to bust apart 10 years of support email and am going to list a few other issues that you will encounter if you are also trying to do the same thing.

First, it takes forever to import email into Confluence. On a modern 2.66GHz quad proc Xeon with 24GB of RAM, it took nearly an hour to import last year's support archive of 4500 emails. Conversely, it took mhonarc less than two minutes to process the same archive.

Once the email is inside Confluence, the search functionality works quite nicely. However, everything, both the email messages and the attachments, are displayed in search results with the date you fed the archive in. Once you open the email, the right date is displayed, but when the email shows up in a search list, the feeding day appears.

I spent the better part of a day feeding in our entire 10 year support email list. But this issue of only showing mail in plaintext was just too painful, so I decided to try and delete the Space that contained the archive. I thought this would go very quickly, but I think the system tried to delete one email at a time. There were 25,000 of them, so this was taking forever. I waited a couple of hours and didn't see any further progress (disk space was no longer decreasing, but CPU was pegged), so I just gave up and deleted my entire Confluence installation and re-installed it.

I would not recommend Confluence for large email archives even if they fix this HTML display issue because of these other problems I have encountered.

mhonarc isn't perfect and it is missing a search engine that you have to add separately (however, the Namazu engine seems to be built for it). But it has the advantage of being both highly configurable without changing the code, and open source. And it is blazing fast - you can build your 10 year mail archive in under 15 minutes.

Good luck no matter which direction you go.
todd

Hi Todd,

Thanks for the suggestion.

While I cannot speak for everyone else who has a problem with this, we really want to keep it integrated in to Confluence rather than implementing yet another system.

To be honest I think that Atlassians handling of this bug/feature (and probably quite a few others) is pretty poor given that html emails are pretty standard across the board these days.

Rob

There is the example of MHonArc http://www.mhonarc.org/

This open source software hasn't been worked on since 2006, but it still does a very good job of ripping through recent email and displaying it in HTML format.

Support have referred me to the bug fixing policy (http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Bug+Fixing+Policy) which supports the fact that this bug should have been fixed a long time ago (I still can't believe it has been open for 5 years!).

From the bug fixing polixy with comments inline....

If a bug is critical (production application down or major malfunction causing business revenue loss or high numbers of staff unable to perform their normal functions) then it will be fixed in the next maintenance release provided that:

The fix is technically feasible (i.e. it doesn't require a major architectural change).
> This should be not only feasible but relatively simple (see Charles Millers comments)

It does not impact the quality or integrity of a product.
> It doesn't if it is an option and not the default.

For non-critical bugs, the developer assigned to fixing bugs prioritises the non-critical bug according to these factors:

How many of our supported configurations are affected by the problem.
> All of them whether the bug has been reported or not.

Whether there is an effective workaround or patch.
> As discussed here give the option to display as html.

How difficult the issue is to fix.
> Should be pretty straight forward given Charles Millers comments.

Whether many bugs in one area can be fixed at one time.
> No idea.

I find it odd that every email client (of which Confluence is acting as one in this case) has the option to display HTML emails and yet despite this ticket being open for 5 years the option has still not been implemented.

I disagree that CONF-503 is a blocker. The reason I was given by support for not displaying HTML emails is that it is a security risk (which it looks like CONF-503 is trying to address); this may be true but for an internal system like ours the option should be available to enable it.

Very important for us as well. Some customer mails include screenshots, drawings, etc.. - with the mail converted to text, all the information is lost and emails make no sense.

+1 from me. Our sales guys want to import newsletter emails into Confluence for searching. Maybe they're too hung up on appearances, but text-only doesn't do it for them.