This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Email text is displayed black by Thunderbird even when another colour is specified in the HTML

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by dane-m

dane-m
dane-m
more options

I came across the thread https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1208444 when I tried finding out why my attempts to compose an email with coloured text were unsuccessful. Failing to find a solution, I resorted to commenting in my email that the recipient should imagine that the previous sentence was green. By way of reply I was told that it had indeed been green.

I then experimented by sending myself an email. I typed three lines of text. Then I used Format - Text Colour to try to change the default colour to green before typing a fourth line on text. Then I selected the second line of text and used Format - Text Colour to try to change its colour to red. Ditto for the third line of text, but to blue. Finally I typed a fifth line of text. None of the colour changes appeared to take effect, i.e. all the lines were black. It looked just the same, i.e. all black, when I received it and read it with Thunderbird. When, however, I received it and read it using K-9 Mail on my smartphone, the first line was black, the second red, the third blue, and the fourth and fifth green.

My next step was to use 'Save As' to create an EML file from the email. Here's the relevant section from the file:

DA8A011ABBEB54C87D8E0E45

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> Typed as black.

<font color="#ff0000">Typed as black and later changed to red.</font>

<font color="#33ccff">Typed as black and later changed to blue.</font>

<font color="#009900">Typed after selecting green as colour.

Typed after changing third line to blue.
</font>

--

DA8A011ABBEB54C87D8E0E45--

As you can see, the colour specifications are there.

My first thought was to wonder whether the 'font color' specifications were being ignored in favour of the colour specified in 'body', so I edited that line to read '<body text="#ff0000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">' and opened the EML file with Thunderbird. Once again all the text appeared black.

It seems that the version of Thunderbird I am using (60.7.1 on Ubuntu) is ignoring font colour specifications for display purposes, thereby giving the false impression when composing emails that it is impossible to specify the font colour. That might well also have been what was happening to the original poster in https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1208444.

Is there any setting that I might have changed that could be forcing Thunderbird to use a black font always?

I came across the thread https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1208444 when I tried finding out why my attempts to compose an email with coloured text were unsuccessful. Failing to find a solution, I resorted to commenting in my email that the recipient should imagine that the previous sentence was green. By way of reply I was told that it had indeed been green. I then experimented by sending myself an email. I typed three lines of text. Then I used Format - Text Colour to try to change the default colour to green before typing a fourth line on text. Then I selected the second line of text and used Format - Text Colour to try to change its colour to red. Ditto for the third line of text, but to blue. Finally I typed a fifth line of text. None of the colour changes appeared to take effect, i.e. all the lines were black. It looked just the same, i.e. all black, when I received it and read it with Thunderbird. When, however, I received it and read it using K-9 Mail on my smartphone, the first line was black, the second red, the third blue, and the fourth and fifth green. My next step was to use 'Save As' to create an EML file from the email. Here's the relevant section from the file: --------------DA8A011ABBEB54C87D8E0E45 Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> </head> <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> Typed as black.<br> <br> <font color="#ff0000">Typed as black and later changed to red.</font><br> <br> <font color="#33ccff">Typed as black and later changed to blue.</font><br> <br> <font color="#009900">Typed after selecting green as colour.<br> <br> Typed after changing third line to blue.<br> </font> <div class="moz-signature">-- <br> <b> </b></div> </body> </html> --------------DA8A011ABBEB54C87D8E0E45-- As you can see, the colour specifications are there. My first thought was to wonder whether the 'font color' specifications were being ignored in favour of the colour specified in 'body', so I edited that line to read '<body text="#ff0000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">' and opened the EML file with Thunderbird. Once again all the text appeared black. It seems that the version of Thunderbird I am using (60.7.1 on Ubuntu) is ignoring font colour specifications for display purposes, thereby giving the false impression when composing emails that it is impossible to specify the font colour. That might well also have been what was happening to the original poster in https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1208444. Is there any setting that I might have changed that could be forcing Thunderbird to use a black font always?

All Replies (1)

dane-m
dane-m Question owner
more options

Ah! I see there is a problem with my original post as the HTML that I included has not survived intact. I've attached a screenshot of it.