How to paste formatted text as plain text into Thunderbird

When you copy text to the Windows clipboard, the formatting of said text is usually copied alongside the textual bits of information. When you paste the copied text into a rich text editor afterwards, you will notice that the formatting will be retained. It does not really matter if you paste it into Microsoft Word, a rich text editor on the web, an email client like Thunderbird, or any other text editor supporting formatting.
While that may be useful at times, for instance to keep titles and headlines intact, you may end up with a badly formatted text that you need to adjust manually.
In the past, I did encounter this situation a lot when I copied text from a website or from a document into Thunderbird's compose window. The result was a badly formatted text that I had to format manually before I send it to the recipient.
So what can you do to speed up the process? I know some users who copy the text into a plain text editor like Notepad first before they copy it again from it to the email client or another program where they want to make use of it.
While that works just fine, it is not the best solution as it takes longer than it should.
It is also possible to use a third party program such as PureText which processes the text if you press the right keyboard shortcut.
That's however still not the best solution, unless you want a global solution that works in all programs that you work with.
In Thunderbird, you simply have to paste using the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-V instead of Ctrl-V. That is all. The shortcut pastes all text as plain text so that you do not have to take care of that manually at all.
Best of all? That is also working in Firefox.
So, you got the best of both worlds now. If you want to paste formatted text into an email in Thunderbird, use Ctrl-V to do so. If you want plain text instead, use Ctrl-Shift-V to do just that.
If you prefer to use the menu, select Edit > Paste without formatting to do so.
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You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!