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.

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

How to turn off bold/italics/underline in HTML mail displayed as plaintext?

  • 1 tontu
  • 1 am na jafe-jafe bii
  • 18 views
  • i mujjee tontu mooy maciejjo

more options

Hi!

I use Thunderbird at a workplace where HTML mail is fairly regular thing, but I prefer to hide all the HTML formatting and display it as plain text, which can be easily done by selecting View > Message Body As > Plain Text, but it seems to convert original HTML formatting to this simple plain text formatting, meaning surrounding it in * for bold, _ for underline, and / for italics, which I find annoying, because often it makes the message harder to read, e.g. inserts lots of these formatting consecutively: "*Reason for Software Replacement****Decision:*", sometimes inside words, and generally does more harm than good. It also breaks URLs, because they are displayed like this: "_https://google.com_", and Thunderbird treats trailing underline as part of URL, so the links are incorrect.

Can this whole formatting be dropped when displaying HTML as Plain Text?

Hi! I use Thunderbird at a workplace where HTML mail is fairly regular thing, but I prefer to hide all the HTML formatting and display it as plain text, which can be easily done by selecting View > Message Body As > Plain Text, but it seems to convert original HTML formatting to this simple plain text formatting, meaning surrounding it in * for bold, _ for underline, and / for italics, which I find annoying, because often it makes the message harder to read, e.g. inserts lots of these formatting consecutively: "*Reason for Software Replacement****Decision:*", sometimes inside words, and generally does more harm than good. It also breaks URLs, because they are displayed like this: "_https://google.com_", and Thunderbird treats trailing underline as part of URL, so the links are incorrect. Can this whole formatting be dropped when displaying HTML as Plain Text?

Saafara biñ tànn

As I was writing the question, I found my answer in Thunderbird config registry, but I decided to post it anyway, as I did not find It asked elsewhere. The solution is to go to Preferences > Advanced > Config Editor and set the "converter.html2txt.structs" option to false.

Jàng tontu lii ci fi mu bokk 👍 0

All Replies (1)

more options

Saafara yiñ Tànn

As I was writing the question, I found my answer in Thunderbird config registry, but I decided to post it anyway, as I did not find It asked elsewhere. The solution is to go to Preferences > Advanced > Config Editor and set the "converter.html2txt.structs" option to false.