thunderbird-android
thunderbird-android copied to clipboard
thunderbird
Feature Request: Send HTML formated mails
Expected behavior
It would be cool to send mails with bold, italics, underlined and ~~crossed~~ words, lists, etc. Maybe using MarkDown or a button that showed a "formating bar" (maybe at the bottom of the screen?).
Note: a preview button or a live preview would be also very appreciated.
Actual behavior
There's no way to do it
Environment
K-9 Mail version: 5.114 (F-droid)
Android version: 6.0.1
Account type (IMAP, POP3, WebDAV/Exchange): IMAP
The hard part is developing a UI that is usable given the Android screen size and number of possible options.
I think the best library for this is probably https://github.com/1gravity/Android-RTEditor
From the screenshots it looks like the K@-Mail fork actually uses it. RTEditor is Apache 2.0 licensed (like K-9) so it is fine for us to use as well.
I don't tend to need to write formatted email so this is quite low on my priority list. If someone wants to pick it up I'm happy to review code though.
I think that considering the UI problems using markdown or similar typable markup languages is probably the way to go.
I personally would like to see this feature, if markdown is considered an option I will probably start working on it.
Have you taken a look at Memento note taking app? https://github.com/yaa110/Memento Just found it myself. It has limited rich text capabilities, but the UI is very intuitive. Being able to change colors and embed tables and images seems like a must have nowadays. Switching to markup would be a great feature to support advanced editing.
The toolbar could be placed on a menu or pop up window to save space, just some thoughts.
Also looked at RichEditor for Android, https://github.com/wasabeef/richeditor-android , but it has not been updated in years.
Great App guys!
Memento seems to use RichEditor, and that lib has actually been updated roughly a year ago. Looks nice though, we should take it into consideration
Is there any way this could be prioritised? K9 is the best email app for Android but whenever I recommend it I always have to say 'but you can't format your emails at all'. Then they look at me like I've travelled from the ancient past (which I sort of have I guess!). The other popular email apps I've had a look at all allow formatting: they may be inferior to K9 in a thousand ways, but formatting does seem to be regarded as a basic function now. Afraid I can't code but very happy to test.
Same here this quite and old request and any modern app out there supports rich text by default so I can't understand why k-9 does not.
Sent from a fair mobile
On Sat, 22 Dec 2018, 11:42 SternByName <[email protected] wrote:
Is there any way this could be prioritised? K9 is the best email app for Android but whenever I recommend it I always have to say 'but you can't format your emails at all'. Then they look at me like I've travelled from the ancient past (which I sort of have I guess!). The other popular email apps I've had a look at all allow formatting: they may be inferior to K9 in a thousand ways, but formatting does seem to be regarded as a basic function now. Afraid I can't code but very happy to test.
— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/1745#issuecomment-449561518, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ADYMD7DL7lNKUfEDIZ310GRBQhPwEPPPks5u7gyVgaJpZM4KeH_m .
Incomplete list of things that implementations have to take into account:
- The 'message format' setting needs to be respected. Don't enable rich text editing when composing plain text messages.
- There should be a quick way to show/hide the formatting toolbar; this state should persist. I imagine most people only occasionally use formatting features. So having the toolbar hidden most of the time and being able to bring it up quickly seems like a valuable feature.
- When editing drafts in "rich text mode" load the
text/htmlpart of the draft. Check the contents and display a warning if the draft contains HTML tags that the editor doesn't support. - Currently, when composing a message, we create the
text/htmlpart from the plain text the user has entered. With a rich text editor we'll have to create thetext/plainpart from HTML. For this to work well in practice we'll probably have to dramatically enhance the capabilities ofHtmlToPlainText. - Add support for
EXTRA_HTML_TEXT.
This feature requires a lot of changes and chances are we will introduce quite a few bugs in the process. Because of this I want us to have a build flag to be able to disable this feature for stable versions until the feature is stable enough.
There is lib which could suit for typeface toolbar and edittext: https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/AztecEditor-Android/ It is design to write html code but we could use only the text editor part.
I understand the work needed to add an html editor and so to send actual html email. Since in settings we can choose to send html emails, would be an option to set content-type to text/html when those settings is specified? It would allow to add and correctly read an html signature at least.
it's not just the ability to format text that's glaringly missing - it's also the ability to insert links and inline images:
As for the UI that's incredibly easy to implement - all you need is a formatting toolbar at the top or bottom of the screen, similar to the one that's in the UI I'm using to type this message. Several other Android email clients have one.
As things stand, I have to use a different email client to send several messages every day, which is insane when this is such a basic feature request.
Dave
Any progress here? This is a strong weakness of this even perfect app for mailing. I hope someone will look at it and add support for formatted (using Markdown or some kind of WYSIWYG editor) in some of the upcoming releases. I looked at so many mailing apps for Android and found this app the best (has PGP support, nice UI, all options I need, good widget, ...) but there is still missing rich text editor support. So, what do you mean, is it an acceptable feature request?
Is there a reason this hasn't happened yet? Is there something making this difficult to implement, if not, then I might be able to try and open a pull request to fix this, as this has been extremely annoying for me. Unless it's a lot of work to implement.
Is there a reason this hasn't happened yet? Is there something making this difficult to implement, if not, then I might be able to try and open a pull request to fix this, as this has been extremely annoying for me. Unless it's a lot of work to implement.
In my opinion, the only possible explanation for lacking such a basic feature is that someone with a stranglehold on the project hates non-plaintext email, and has been blocking it for the past decade.
I suggest that K9 could have an option to interpret the the text as Markdown and convert it before it is sent. Markdown allows writing text with a clean obvious structure without almost any extra interface.
One extra piece of interface useful for this is syntax highlighting because it is sometimes hard to predict if a specific thing is recognized as Markdown formatting, or a way to preview the message as HTML to make sure that it is formatted correctly.
I would prefer this over a usual formatting UI, or I would like at least a way to view and edit the HTML code directly to make sure that there are no undesirable tags.
There is lib which could suit for typeface toolbar and edittext: https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/AztecEditor-Android/ It is design to write html code but we could use only the text editor part.
The HTML part is useful. I would like to keep it there so I can check the HTML of the message directly.
Hi folks. I'd love to have this one as well, I suspect the only reason it hasn't happened yet is the difficulty to implement. Doing this right is incredibly complex, as there are various security implications for example when you reply to an email that includes HTML. I'm hoping this is something we can work out in 2025. If someone reading this has expertise in this area we'd very much appreciate your support.
Hi, just wanted to mention that this feature should be implemented in a way that the rich text editor for composing HTML emails should be directly reusable for creating HTML signatures, which is another much wanted feature, essential for most users I’d say.
And while I’m here, I’ll just add that it’s probably the only thing blocking me to switch from Edison Email right now. :)
I was going to create an issue for not being able reply to someone with quoted reply while edititng it as HTML. When you edit quoted reply, its all converted to text. But now I know thunderbird-android doesn't support HTML editing in the first place. So yes, much needed feature.
Hi folks. I'd love to have this one as well, I suspect the only reason it hasn't happened yet is the difficulty to implement. Doing this right is incredibly complex, as there are various security implications for example when you reply to an email that includes HTML. I'm hoping this is something we can work out in 2025. If someone reading this has expertise in this area we'd very much appreciate your support.
@kewisch isn't it already implemented in thunderbird desktop and other email clients? There would be some set of standards/best practices to follow regarding which HTML tags to support and how to handle security implications. It can be kept at minimal at the initial stage. Inline HTML editing and bold, italics, underline would be sufficient for most users.
Wooah, no an answer in almost 10 years? This is a very important missing feature for adding links or text formatting like bold and italic.
This feature request is something that would make the K-9 Mail/Thunderbird on Android more popular and useful for daily use.
Is there something new in the development for this feature request?
I recently migrating to Thunderbird on all my devices.
Then I spent an hour this morning trying to figure out why I can't add bold text to my emails on my Android phone.
I come here to find that no one has been arsed to add this basic functionality to a popular ten year old app. Not even support for markup.
Here we have the moldy skellington of the ball Mozilla or whoever is responsible dropped years ago. Keep up the fair work, folks.
I will now migrate all of my devices to some other email platform.
I recently migrating to Thunderbird on all my devices.
Then I spent an hour this morning trying to figure out why I can't add bold text to my emails on my Android phone.
I come here to find that no one has been arsed to add this basic functionality to a popular ten year old app. Not even support for markup.
Here we have the moldy skellington of the ball Mozilla or whoever is responsible dropped years ago. Keep up the fair work, folks.
I will now migrate all of my devices to some other email platform.
I recommend you to look at Fairemail. I was in a similar situation to yours and found Fairemail to be great replacement for this mobile version of Thunderbird.
I recently migrating to Thunderbird on all my devices.
Then I spent an hour this morning trying to figure out why I can't add bold text to my emails on my Android phone.
I come here to find that no one has been arsed to add this basic functionality to a popular ten year old app. Not even support for markup.
Here we have the moldy skellington of the ball Mozilla or whoever is responsible dropped years ago. Keep up the fair work, folks.
I will now migrate all of my devices to some other email platform.
They acquired an open-source project (K-9 Mail) instead of starting from scratch, but it was not even close in features to the desktop version of Thunderbird or other major competing mobile email clients. So they're basically starting from scratch lol
I use the Fastmail app, and I'm very happy with it.
On Fri, Aug 22, 2025, at 15:57, Philippe Choquette wrote:
PhilC813 left a comment (thunderbird/thunderbird-android#1745) https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/issues/1745#issuecomment-3215463629
I recently migrating to Thunderbird on all my devices.
Then I spent an hour this morning trying to figure out why I can't add bold text to my emails on my Android phone.
I come here to find that no one has been arsed to add this basic functionality to a popular ten year old app. Not even support for markup.
Here we have the moldy skellington of the ball Mozilla or whoever is responsible dropped years ago. Keep up the fair work, folks.
I will now migrate all of my devices to some other email platform.
They acquired an open-source project (K-9 Mail) instead of starting from scratch, but it was not even close in features to the desktop version of Thunderbird or other major competing mobile email clients. So they're basically starting from scratch lol
— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/issues/1745#issuecomment-3215463629, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AIBD3NGZU5F7CRWQCL4WHT33O5YZJAVCNFSM6AAAAABQBEHPFWVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZTEMJVGQ3DGNRSHE. You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: @.***>
-- With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.
The best way to suggest and show interest in a new feature is by creating and/or up-voting the request on Mozilla Connect. The development team take these into consideration when assessing priorities and road-maps. A request exists for HTML formatting and I recommend those interested show their support by up voting this.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/add-html-support-text-styling-in-k-9-mail-thunderbird-android/idi-p/52739
@platform34 - I followed your link and tried to upvote it but it wouldn't accept my Mozilla password although I can log into Mozilla with that password. I then tried clicking the "forgotten password" link but never received the reset password email - I've checked my spam folder and I've clicked "Resend" multiple times. No wonder so few have upvoted it. It's impossible to do.
Just got caught up in the sign in form, too. It defaults to an internal Mozilla LDAP authentication. Before you enter your username, look for the "Sign In with Mozilla Account" button and click that.
