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Override colors in received HTML emails

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I have thesame question as asked in a different forum but with no satisfactory answer: I would like to override default colors in received HTML emails. I modified my userContent.css accordingly. Basically, I need white text on dark background:

$ cat userContent.css body {

 color: white !important; 
 background-color: #303030 !important;

}

td {

 color: white !important;
 background-color: black !important;

}

This works OK for the background color, but the my desired font color (white) is often being ignored, even when I use !important.

As recommended in an answer I added:

  • {
 color: white !important;
 background-color: black !important;

}

But this is an overkill, too much of Thunderbird is made white on a black background. Is there another option to make just the text of the received html email with white font on dark background?

I have the[http://example.com same question] as asked in a different forum but with no satisfactory answer: I would like to override default colors in received HTML emails. I modified my userContent.css accordingly. Basically, I need white text on dark background: $ cat userContent.css body { color: white !important; background-color: #303030 !important; } td { color: white !important; background-color: black !important; } This works OK for the background color, but the my desired font color (white) is often being ignored, even when I use !important. As recommended in [http://example.com an answer] I added: * { color: white !important; background-color: black !important; } But this is an overkill, too much of Thunderbird is made white on a black background. Is there another option to make just the text of the received html email with white font on dark background?

All Replies (6)

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Why not set the colours in preferences and set the option to always apply. Edit > preferences> Display >formatting > colors

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@Matt Thank you for the response! I tried this and also the "Advanced" settings in Formatting but it does not work for some html email text. Any other tip?

Background: Thunderbird 68.7.0 (64-bit) in Ubuntu 19.10.

Endret av user2481009

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You would have to set things for each and every style. Basically it is not going to happen. So folks sending white test with no background set often get replies that there is not message body. Others manually specify black in their fonts and get a similar response as black on black is also invisible.

For instance if the text explicitly sets the font and color, no amount of CSS will over ride that really.

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@Matt Thanks for responding! This sounds not encouraging! Most of the text in the received html email is shown in readable matter but in some emails the text is dark (often dark blue) which is not helpful when you have a dark background. Interestingly it is mainly in emails sent by Outlook. But I wonder whether there is a not another parameter like body and td which would target specifically the text in html-emails. If I choose * as parameter like:

* {

color: white !important;
background-color: black !important;

}

All texts (also html email text) is white and I can read it well. This means the display of colour can be overridden. Do you know any possible parameter to target? I am happy to get several suggestions which I can try, I searched the internet for a hint but was not successful.

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You might try changing the colour of links in the preferences. dark blue is the default I think.

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Thanks Matt for your tip. I tried that but it does not make a difference. When I find time I will play with some html tags in userContent.css. Somebody sent me a link with some possible tags: https://www.w3schools.com/tags/default.asp

If you or anybody else any other hint, I would be delighted!