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Redacting Text In A Thunderbird Email Message

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I recently had occasion to circulate a copy of a received phishing email, to alert members of a computer users group to a scam. I needed to include the format, text and symbology of the scam message in its entirety (ie including the To:, Subject:, and From:, field contents from the message header). I achieved this using Copy /Paste for the message body contents, and Snip to copy the header details. To illustrate the variance of the scam message from the format, text and symbology of a genuine notice from this agency, I Copy/Pasted and Snipped the same contents from another genuine email, which contained my personal information. As I didn't wish recipients to view the few words of my personal data in the genuine message, I needed to redact the private portions of that text. If I could highlight text in the Copy/Paste portions of the text, and then choose a background colour for the highlighting, which matched the text colour, that would achieve the required result, but I cannot find any option in Thunderbird to retain a background highlight, let alone one that matches the text colour, thereby obscuring it. Is there a tidy way in which an opaque rectangle can be overlaid over individual words, to obscure selected text in Thunderbird?

I recently had occasion to circulate a copy of a received phishing email, to alert members of a computer users group to a scam. I needed to include the format, text and symbology of the scam message in its entirety (ie including the To:, Subject:, and From:, field contents from the message header). I achieved this using Copy /Paste for the message body contents, and Snip to copy the header details. To illustrate the variance of the scam message from the format, text and symbology of a genuine notice from this agency, I Copy/Pasted and Snipped the same contents from another genuine email, which contained my personal information. As I didn't wish recipients to view the few words of my personal data in the genuine message, I needed to redact the private portions of that text. If I could highlight text in the Copy/Paste portions of the text, and then choose a background colour for the highlighting, which matched the text colour, that would achieve the required result, but I cannot find any option in Thunderbird to retain a background highlight, let alone one that matches the text colour, thereby obscuring it. Is there a tidy way in which an opaque rectangle can be overlaid over individual words, to obscure selected text in Thunderbird?

All Replies (2)

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There's a highlighting add-on, or the same can be achieved with simple html span tags.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/textmarker/

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1287456

This type of 'redacting' might be effective for the casual reader, but not if they examine the message source, Ctrl+U.

Modified by sfhowes

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I appreciate your suggestions but as you mentioned, the results are easily circumvented so they are not really a satisfactory solution. Thanks anyway.