Highlight text in your outgoing mails with the Textmarker extension for Thunderbird

Maybe you're communicating with your bank, or mailing your colleagues regarding a project, or you're responding to a business inquiry. You may want a way to keep track of the conversation, and see how it evolves.
Let's say the mails contain specific points or questions that you want the recipient to respond to. Usually, we read the reply and refer to the previous message for context.
There is a quicker way to get this last part done, if you could highlight the content before sending the message, like with a permanent marker pen. Textmarker is a Thunderbird extension which does that. It's very simple to use, and yet quite handy.
Note: This extension should not be confused with the Firefox add-on of the same name.
Textmarker is only accessible from the Thunderbird mail composer (Write window aka the mail editor). So, you cannot use it for mails that are in your Inbox, Sent, etc (any folder basically).
Here's how to use the extension. Hit the Write button and enter some text, select a part of the message and click on the Mark button on the top right-corner of the window. The effect is instantaneous, you'll see a color appear around the text. Textmarker supports various colors, to change the color, hold the Ctrl key while clicking the Mark button. A pop-up window will appear that lists 10 colors, it also mentions the name of each shade. An arrow indicates the active color.
Now that you have highlighted the text, go ahead and send the mail. When you receive a reply to it, the colored text will make it easier for you to analyze the reply (without reading the entire message), or even serve as a reminder.
The color effect added by the add-on is persistent, i.e, the highlighted text is retained even after you exit the mail client. To remove the highlight effect, select the text, hold the Shift key and click on the Mark button.
Want more color options? Head to the extension's settings, it has a long list of colors that you can choose from. You can set multiple colors as your favorites, but may not choose more than 10 colors because that's the limit of the pop-up that appears when you use the Ctrl + Mark combination. This can be useful as you can color-code the highlighted content by priority.
I would suggest picking the colors based on the theme that you're using, you don't want something that's too flashy as opposed to a shade that is easier on the eyes.
You may have noticed that Textmarker plays a sound when you change the highlight color, and the audio is a bit loud isn't it? Fortunately, there is a toggle on the add-on's settings page, that you can use to disable the sound. It's located near the top right corner, just above the list of colors. The highlighted content is only visible in your Thunderbird profile, your webmail isn't impacted in any way.
I couldn't find the Git for the source code of Textmarker. It would've been nice to have the add-on work with incoming messages. You could forward the mail to yourself, it's not the best option, but I suppose it can be a good workaround.






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!