More info may help here. One of your screenshots is similar to the right-click menu when viewing a message. Do you have the tool bar and composition tool bar turned on? You can check that by doing right-click near top of main view and also from compose view.

Yes -- Toolbars are all ON. To clarify, the smaller screenshot IS of my viewing message context menu. But in the compose view, there are far fewer options (see new screenshot).

Okay, I'm lost on what your concern is. What, explicitly, do you think should be on the context menu? You posted two screenshots. The one on the left doesn't appear to show options for handling an email message.

What, explicitly, do you think should be on the context menu?

Whatever the user wants there! User customized context menus may be possible or are utilized elsewhere; I don't know. For starters, while composing a message, some common mac options would be swell:

• Look Up <selection> (IE definitions, synonyms, other info)
• Search Google for <selection>
• Services ► <mac add-ons> ...such as

  Liquid which allows access as a service

Well, the ones there now are in context to the concept of an email message. Those suggestions of yours would not be in context. However, it's your idea, so submit a suggestion if you wish. This forum is only for support.

With all humility, stop & think for a moment about the various ways people use email. Composing email is simply word processing in many respects -- where using WP 'pop up' research tools via context menus is commonplace...

Composing email or doing ANY document work includes the ability to quickly research a word, phrase, or fact-check whatever you wish. Is email disqualified for some reason? If my error here is in looking for support, I apologize for the misdirected query. Ranting about missing features possibly belongs elsewhere. That does not excuse being shut down without due consideration. Just sayin

Ok I think it is time to stop this.

Thunderbird does not integrate into apple os to get right click menus, it has it's own and they are hard coded and in the compose window exceedingly limited. If you want Apple integration, you may have to buy Apple. Thunderbird does not even have write access to the apple address book. There is an option to file a bug requesting enhancement of the product using Bugzilla if you wish to pursue the idea further but enhancement is not really within the scope of user support.

The view that composing an email is simply word processing is also a poor analogy. Word processing has an ultimate destination on paper using an already defined printer for margins and other printing capabilities. The entire PDF file format was invented to try and make word processing look the same when send over the internet and relies largely on the adobe PostScript printer language for it's encoding.

Email is expected to arrive looking as it should without all those proprietary overheads. But it is not that simple as each "browser" has it's own idiosyncrasies. This page from mailchimp a fairly large emailing house offers information on what HTML components not to use in email and which are generally supported. Basically if it is a HTML feature that is less than 20 years old it will break on some receivers machines.

One of the most powerful features of the web browser, and also by default email is CSS (cascading style sheets) but acceptance of them in email is patchy at best to downright poor. I suggest for that you look at the campaignmonitor reference (another large email mailing house who make a living sending readable mail on commission) Note how Gmail, AOL and Yahoo make simple formatting of email hard.

Many word processing features do not lend themselves to HTML web pages at all and with loads of rubbish support for existing HTML formatting features anything more than basic text with a couple of images can be problematical. So forget that word processing analogy. It will not serve you reliably.

Thanks for the first paragraph; yeah well, there's Apple Mail... it's a shame about that.

Everyone probably has their own lovely definition of 'word processing', but now this is stumbling into BTWBS territory <no offense>... Technobabble jargon may speak to coders, but they're not likely here with users looking for support -- or, apparently in my case, merely whining about missing features. Again, apologies for the misdirected frustration, afflicted with demotivational fallout syndrome. I know... how tiresome.