it is my guess it is the stylesheet Thunderbird uses to display the email. That is what the chrome: link is about at least, how the email interacts with the actual program. The user interface is built around chrome: statements and links.

As for the body within a body I do not see that with the email I picked at random to look at what you said, but I wonder if it might have something to so with encrypted messages or text attachments.

Thanks for trying. The two sets of HTML tags + the link happened even with a short e-mail with no images.

The HTML is also littered with all the extra stuff that litters MS Word conversions to HMTL. Aha! but, then, I realized that I originally composed in Word and pasted into TBird. Even tho I wasn't working in HTML in Word, these Word tags appear? And even tho they don't appear in the e-mail source, they turn up when the e-mail is saved as HTML? No time to keep testing this.

The short e-mail with no images was typed directly into TBird and, when saved as HTML, doesn't have a lot of extra tags but does have the double HTML set of tags. No time to keep testing this either.

So I realize I'm going about this backwards and don't need TBird to create the HTML. I've created a clean HTML template and will pass the relevant variable content thru a Word-to-HTML conversion process and then paste into the HTML template. This will work fine for a rather simple mailing with the variable text all in one cell of a table.

Again thanks for sharing and listening, Jeanne

Microsoft word places HTML onto the system clipboard when you click copy. Along with rich text format, images, plain text and a collection of binary objects that only other office programs even know what to do with.

Thunderbird, being HTML based will take the HTML version as a first choice of it is present on the clipboard. Most notably with word documents is you get the entire contents of the normal temple as well as far as I can see. 1 word can lead to hundreds of KB of data.

Personally I would recommend the mail merge addon. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mail-merge/ Is uses CSV files as a data source and can be a little quirky if you are not familiar with CSV data files, but is Thunderbird's answer to words mail merge, except to email and works quite well in my limited experience.

I would not suggest using word as the binary objects it places in the HTML have been known to trigger virus false positives, something I would not want in a mailout to customers or supporters.

I've used Bergmann's Mail Merge and have treasured it for years. Neat, speedy little thing. I was just using Word for my planning and drafting and had no idea how much hidden baggage was transported when I pasted into TBird and then saved that e-mail as HTML.

My real problem was in generating an HTML file for the web to allow a "to view this email in your browser click here" option. Because this is so simple an e-mail (and not a big mailing), I can definitely work directly in TBird and then directly in Notepad++ to make the corresponding web page.

But thanks a million for your last para. I had not heard of those false positives tho it doesn't surprise me one bit. I'll be way more careful to scrub Word's footprints from both the e-mail AND the web page. Truly invaluable.

Very sincerely, Jeanne

My personal choice for a word processor to generate HTML for pasting is LibreOffice. None, including Thunderbird do it well. But LibreOffice is the best I have found for just the necessary HTML and I tend to use it for blog posts as the blogger editor is a tad unwieldy once you move onto tables. It might have something to do with LibreOffice being open source and folks trying to follow RFC's in their code to avoid criticism, but LibreOffice writer does a pretty good job generating HTML. I wish I could say the same thing about base, but have encountered limits on every outing.

Thanks so much for this. I don't think I'm going to take all this typing and learn a new program, but when I do this again, I'll definitely take an afternoon to check out LibreOffice. I used Open Office in the past and I was certainly wondering about going that route. I've got a rather kludgy way to do what I have to do but, for the moment, it will be less error prone than transferring into a product I don't know well. Those would be the minor errors that become almost impossible to notice after one is at this for a while.

By the way, I may have an answer as to why I was getting double HTML tags and you were not. If I create a plain text e-mail and then ask TBird to save as HTML, I get only one set. But if I'm composing HTML or both plain text and HTML then TBird is including the e-mail's HTML, HEAD, and BODY tags within the container tags of the new file. And if that is not the answer, then I've reached my limit on this, but I figured I'd share that guess.

Really, I'm very grateful, Jeanne