I set Evolution 2.22.3.1 to receive plain text only and I send plain text only.
Many people send me HTML or RTF emails.
When I reply, the edit window dutifully prepends the text of the original message as a quote along with the who and when stuff.
Sometimes the quote text appears inside dotted lines - like some sort of formatting box. When this happens, I cannot split the quote to interleave my reply.

Usually, to split a quote, I just position the insertion point at the end of a line, and press enter. This produces a newline with no > at the front - eg. a non-quote line.

If there is a box around the text, however, doing this just creates a quote line.

I cannot even backspace over the > to remove it.

The workaround appears to be to copy the quote text in it's entirety, then paste-as-quotation below it. Then I can erase the original quote. Once done, I am able to split the quoted passage to my hearts content.

Examining the page source (by opening the html message in firefox) I see that this behaviour is associated with emails formatted using table tags. The quote text seems to be trying to preserve this layout.

Typically, the table is just a single column with two or three rows. The bottom row is usually some sort of promotion. Otherwise nothing is added to the utility.

Dispite my opening, this is not restricted to plain text. HTML mode has the same problem.

Does anyone know of a way to disable this format-box thingy?

I switched to Icedove some time ago, but IIRC I solved this with the following setting: Edit->Preferences->Composer Preferences->Reply style: Quoted

The "Inline (Outlook style)" setting gave me the tables. Figures huh?

HTH

Interesting approach.

Inlining the original message does not prepend the > to quoted lines - it's not supposed to, but if I interleave reply text I want people to be able to quickly identify which is which. I guess I could set it to auto-indent my text ... which is what RMS does, but he uses rmail under emacs.

It's not a terrible problem and the majority of the emails in my inbox don't suffer from it. I saw quite a few bug reports based on this, but nothing that went into any useful detail. Hence the post here.

I downloaded Evolution 2.26.2 and tried out what I posted and it didn't work as I remembered.

Guess I need to run a memtest.