How can I remove the background color setting from the HTML email composition, so that the email is sent without a specified background color?
I prefer a "dark" theme, but I don't want to inflict my preferences on my colleagues who read emails in a "light" themed context, so I do not want to set a composition background for my emails as a "dark" background. At the same time, if I configure my email composition to use a white background, once sent, that setting overrides my preference for a dark-themed experience, and makes it headache-inducing to reference my own emails.
Emails that my colleagues send to me, and emails I send via our webmail interface, do not have this issue because they do not explicitly identify a background color. I would like to cause Thunderbird to similarly not specify default, email-wide colors, ideally for both background and foreground in HTML compositions, but no such option is available in the Composition preferences.
Chosen solution
Finally figured out how to do this properly today, and I feel somewhat like an idiot for not realizing it immediately.
In Preferences > Advanced, load the Config Editor and accept the risk. Locate your msgcompose.background_color and set it to transparent (the literal string "transparent", no quotes). This should propagate to the CSS sheet that is injected into your email, allowing it to display on your system as matching your default bg color, but allowing it to display on others' systems as matching their default BG color.
I believe that, to ensure the text is also rendered properly in all cases, you should set your msgcompose.text_color to "initial" as well...
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You could ensure your recipients do not receive html emails. In Options > Composition > 'General' tab select 'Send Options' and choose to only send in Plain Text. This strips all formatting.
Alternatively, you could set the computer to use a dark theme.
EG: Control Panel > Personalization > Window colour and appearance
choose 'High Contrast Black'
then everything will appear black to you, but the actual email still uses the default white background as specified in Options > Composition.
Thanks for the suggestionsToad-Hall said
You could ensure your recipients do not receive html emails. In Options > Composition > 'General' tab select 'Send Options' and choose to only send in Plain Text. This strips all formatting. Alternatively, you could set the computer to use a dark theme. EG: Control Panel > Personalization > Window colour and appearance choose 'High Contrast Black' then everything will appear black to you, but the actual email still uses the default white background as specified in Options > Composition.
Thanks for the suggestions, but neither of these answer my question.
I should clarify that I'm not interested in finding a way to cause my display to render the emails with a dark format, I'm asking about a way to exercise a greater degree of control over the actual contents of my outgoing messages, so as to uniformly stop my messages from specifying fixed rendering colors.
Have you checked your preferences?
Open the Options Window. Click Display -> Formatting. Click the Colors button. Check if the preferred preferences are selected.
The only options that are presented when clicking on the colors button in that location are color options. I'm looking for an option that causes no specific color to be set or applied. The user interface does not appear to provide any way to specify this preference, as selecting any color is a selection of that color as opposed to no specific color...
I want my html email content to render for each recipient using whatever default coloring that recipient has configured. The thunderbird ui does not a to support that option, but I thought I might have missed something or might be able to manually edit a template file or some other settings/configuration file to achieve my desired results...
Chosen Solution
Finally figured out how to do this properly today, and I feel somewhat like an idiot for not realizing it immediately.
In Preferences > Advanced, load the Config Editor and accept the risk. Locate your msgcompose.background_color and set it to transparent (the literal string "transparent", no quotes). This should propagate to the CSS sheet that is injected into your email, allowing it to display on your system as matching your default bg color, but allowing it to display on others' systems as matching their default BG color.
I believe that, to ensure the text is also rendered properly in all cases, you should set your msgcompose.text_color to "initial" as well...