How to get Thunderbird to nicely format Markdown?

Question

I like Thunderbird for my email along with plain text. I disabled HTML emails and generally write most of my stuff in markdown anyway. So I'm looking for a way, to get Thunderbird to display markdown formatted plain text mails nicely when I view them.

To clarify:

I know Markdown Here. It's nice. But it renders plain text mail in markdown format to HTML. That's not the way I want to go: I want to avoid HTML mail and stick with plain text instead.

I just want Thunderbird to show my mails in a nice format when I'm viewing them — like with headers, lists, emphasis, links and of course code snippets.

Answer 1

Source Markdown Here 2.11.4

Markdown Here lets you write email in Markdown and render it (make it pretty!) before sending.

This is great for anyone who doesn't like fiddling around with formatting buttons while writing an email. It's especially good for programmers who write email with code in them -- it even supports syntax highlighting. And for the mathematicians among us: Markdown Here will render TeX formulae as well.

Totally simple to use:

1. Write your email in your email client's rich editor using Github-flavoured Markdown.
2. Right-click in the compose area and then click "Markdown Toggle".
3. Your email is now pretty! (That is, it's been rendered to HTML.)
4. If you like the way it looks, just send it. If you want to change or add something, click "Markdown Toggle" again to get back to your original Markdown.
5. Repeat as necessary.

Disclaimer: I've never used Thunderbird or Markdown Here.

Answer 2

There was a Markdown Viewer extension to Thunderbird once, but according to the reviews it stopped working at some point and is certainly no longer usable after moving Quantum / WebExtensions.

Answer 3

I have a similar wish as the OP, and I just tried Thunderbird 102.12.0; note that my Thunderbird is setup for plain text as default when writing emails, and for replies (even for replies to HTML emails).

So, in principle, I'd still like to just write and send plain text emails; except I'd like the option to temporarily render my plain text response as if Markdown formatted - and, for emails received in plain text format, I'd like the option to render them as if they contained Markdown formatting.

I have tried these two addons:

• https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/markdown-here-revival/
• https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/render-markdown-messages/

Markdown Here adds a button to the formatting toolbar which is ONLY visible when you write HTML e-mails!!! Since my default is writing plain-text e-mails, I do not get to see this button - unless I do SHIFT+click "Write". And what is rather unfortunate in Firefox since forever, is that once you start off writing a message in one mode or another (plain text or HTML), you cannot change it anymore (if you started writing a message and then change your mind, you must then start a new message of the right type, then manually copy/paste your work).

Render Markdown Messages, on the other hand, attempts to format a received plain-text e-mail as Markdown - the formatting is minimal, and they still use the same monospaced font used for displaying plain-text messages. There does not seem to be a way to provide a custom CSS for rendering the Markdown - and the worst for me is, you cannot toggle at runtime whether you want to enable rendering as Markdown or not (no toolbar button, no right-click context menu). Either the extension is enabled to attempt to format all plain-text emails, or not.

So, neither of these are usable for someone like me, unfortunately - and at this time, I cannot really find any other Thunderbird addons that deal with Markdown on this level (i.e. interact with either the writing, or the viewing, of plain-text e-mails).