Unable to Effectively Manage Background and Text Colours
I am not currently able to effectively and consistently manage background and text colours across the different views within Thunderbird.
- My inbox appears to pick up the OS theme colours, and presents with a dark grey background and light grey text. This is not terribly problematic, but it does not seem to respond to any settings changes within Thunderbird.
- When I open a message, it currently has a white background and generally dark text. Some text, dates and times for example, appear light grey. I have been able to alter the general colour profile of this reader view, but not all text is affected and if a dark background is set some text will remain dark and be unreadable.
- Composition windows currently have a dark background and white text. If I am replying to a message, frequently the text of previous messages in the thread is indistinguishable from the background. I can uncheck "Use reader's default colors" and apply explicit values for background and text, but certain text will remain grey regardless of my selections. Additionally, some of my reading seems to imply that these values will be encoded in the html of my messages, which may adversely affect readability for recipients.
From what I can gather searching around online, my experience is not typical. I have spent many hours trying to understand how all of the different colour settings work and interact, and I am not getting anywhere. I've been through every part of Thunderbird's settings looking for the right options to no avail. I accept that it is entirely possible I have overlooked or misunderstood something that may be making this harder than it should be.
Ultimately, I would prefer to have all panes rendered with a consistent dark grey background and light grey text, and I would like to be able to send plain-text messages without html encoded colours. Please let me know if this is not an achievable goal in Thunderbird.
All Replies (2)
When people send out email from mail clients and apparently as you are determined to do to get your preferred aesthetic they set text and background colour in the email. Business refers to it as corporate branding. where text size font and colours are all specified.
You can turn of the ability to render fonts other than your chosen ones in options, but just remember in doing so that emails from people like ebay will quite likely render in some horrible manner. I am not aware of a method to force your choice of background colour and font on an email where this is set by the sender.
Thunderbird when it composes mail uses simple web fonts, and does not specify a clour or a background. I am not aware of a single email I have ever received from outlook or office 365 where this nformation was not specified in the HTML part. You could force all mail to render as text only, that will follow the application theme, but it will ultimately be ugly.
re :and if a dark background is set some text will remain dark and be unreadable.
This sounds like you are choosing to create emails using HTML and you choose to 'Reply' to that email that has been written using HTML. The sender of the original email specifically set the html css code for the font colour to be dark, but they did not set the background colour, so Thunderbird is using your choice for the background which clearly you have also set to dark.
It has been a pain in the proverbial when people send an email which has a load of html coding that states the font colour as dark because they assume the user - you - are using a light background, so they do not bother to set the background colour.
Thunderbird's default dark theme is dark everywhere except for the Message Pane and Compose areas. This was due to popular demand. Whilst many people like the dark theme in general, they do not want to see it in the Message Pane. People receive emails that use HTML and they wanted to read the emails as the user had intended. Many people like to read emails using eg: dark font on light background. It was also a problem if the sender specifically stated the font had to be dark in the code, but did not specify code for the background. Thunderbird does not rewrite the HTML in an email it receives.
So, the question is this, for emails sent to you, do you want to see them as the sender intended or not?
It sounds like you do not.
- Menu icon > Options > Composition
Under 'HTML Style'
- Select checkbox 'Use Readers default colours'
- Menu icon > Options > General
Under 'Language & Appearance'
- click on 'Colours'
- Set 'Text' to white
- Set 'Background' to a dark/black
- Do not select checkbox 'Use sytem Colours'
Override the colours....
- If set to 'Always', then you will use the selected settings and should not have any issues unless the sender of email specified the font as black. However, in those individual cases it can be worked around by viewing the original email in Plain Text and then Replying.
- If set to 'Never' then you will see email as it was intended.
re :and I would like to be able to send plain-text messages without html encoded colours. I can see from your images that you have selected to use HTML set up in Accounts Settings > Composition & Addressing for the account, because the 'Formatting Bar' is visible.
This means you would need to use 'Shift' at time of selecting 'Write' in order to create a Plain Text email. I'm presuming you have set up the Send Options to send in both HTML and Plain Text ?
Using settings as stated above, all my plain text emails do not contain anything. Plain Text does not contain formatting.
Modified by Toad-Hall