The Claws Mail template feature allows you to create specific templates that format your email in precisely the way you want them. Your compositions, your replies, and your forwards can leave your PC laid out exactly the way you want them. And it doesn’t take a programmer or guru to set templates up. You just have to understand the strings used by Claws Mail that allow you to insert specific, pre-configured fields into the body of your email.

Figure 1

You can create templates within one of two windows: “Preferences for current account” or “Preferences” (the former only configures templates for the account being used and the latter configures templates globally). Both of these windows can be opened from within the Configuration menu. Once in either of these windows go to the Templates section where you will find  three tabs (see Figure 1): Compose, Reply, and Forward. The first thing you must do is decide what type of template you want to create. Most often people use the Reply template so they can format how they want their replies to look.

As you can see, in Figure 1, I have already created a template. The template I have created does this when I reply to an email:

The first line of the reply reads In a recent email ORIGINAL_SENDER said the following:

QUOTED_EMAIL

to this REPLY_SENDER says:

BODY_OF_REPLY

A: Because it makes understanding the conversation harder?
Q: What is wrong with top posting?

• Where ORIGINAL_SENDER is who the email came from.
• Where QUOTED_EMAIL is the quoted text of the email you are replying to.
• Where REPLY_SENDER is the full name of the user replying.
• Where BODY_OF_REPLY is the text written in the reply.

You will also notice a bit of snarkiness at the end. ;-)

To achieve this layout I used the following pre-defined tags:

• %N – Original sender.
• \n – New line marker.
• %Q – Quoted message body.
• %af – Full name of sender (me).
• %X – Cursor position.

The %X tag is one of the most interesting of the tags. It is with this tag you define where you want your cursor to be placed when you begin the email. Because Claws Mail defaults to bottom posting, and has no means to change this to top posting, you have to define top posting by using the %X tag. So if I want to always top post in my replies I would create a reply template like this:

%X\n
Is my reply to an email sent by %N, that said:\n
%Q

To get a full list of all the possible tags to use click the Information button inside of the Templates configuration window. You will also notice you can use regular expressions in your templates. The possibilites abound!

Final thoughts

Once you start using templates in Claws Mail you will really begin to see how flexible this application is. Once I started using templates I never looked back to Thunderbird. Have you created a cool template for Claws Mail? If so, share it with your fellow Ghacks readers.