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

Ashwin
Feb 14, 2021
Email, Thunderbird
|
10

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.

How to use textmarker
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.

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

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.

Change the color in textmarker

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.

Textmarker settings

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.

Summary
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Author Rating
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5 based on 1 votes
Software Name
Textmarker
Operating System
Thunderbird
Software Category
Internet
Price
Free
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Comments

  1. JMGG said on January 19, 2012 at 8:25 am
    Reply

    You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?

    1. BalaC said on January 19, 2012 at 9:42 am
      Reply

      I think its thunderbird

    2. Martin Brinkmann said on January 19, 2012 at 10:15 am
      Reply

      It is Mozilla Thunderbird.

  2. Salaam said on September 24, 2012 at 9:52 pm
    Reply

    Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.

  3. Claud said on December 19, 2012 at 2:08 am
    Reply

    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.

    1. Lynda said on February 12, 2013 at 3:37 pm
      Reply

      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!!!!

    2. Chad said on November 20, 2018 at 4:24 pm
      Reply

      Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…

    3. Ivan X said on January 21, 2021 at 4:50 pm
      Reply

      Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.

  4. Andrew said on October 26, 2013 at 7:06 am
    Reply

    This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)

  5. Charles said on December 7, 2013 at 7:23 pm
    Reply

    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.

  6. garth said on November 7, 2014 at 7:13 pm
    Reply

    You are a god – thank you!

  7. Faisal said on February 9, 2015 at 10:09 am
    Reply

    thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)

  8. Simon said on March 24, 2015 at 11:36 pm
    Reply

    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

  9. Olu said on April 14, 2015 at 1:35 pm
    Reply

    Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
    Thank you

  10. Coenig said on July 23, 2015 at 7:36 am
    Reply

    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 :-)

  11. Fali said on January 20, 2016 at 4:19 pm
    Reply

    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.

    1. MIki said on January 10, 2019 at 11:54 am
      Reply

      I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!

  12. Christina said on January 20, 2016 at 6:14 pm
    Reply

    Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007

  13. Oz said on July 22, 2016 at 3:20 pm
    Reply

    Great tip! Thanks!

  14. Tracy said on September 1, 2016 at 4:48 pm
    Reply

    Worked for me, too – thank you!!!

  15. shawn said on September 9, 2016 at 10:25 am
    Reply

    It’s Worked for me, too
    thank you very much!

  16. Jari said on October 31, 2016 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!

  17. Michel H said on November 30, 2016 at 11:08 pm
    Reply

    Thank you so much. Solved!
    Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
    Thank you again. M

  18. Ziad Bitar said on January 9, 2017 at 2:00 am
    Reply

    This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.

    Thanks.

  19. Anonymous said on February 15, 2017 at 5:24 pm
    Reply

    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.

  20. Rochelle said on March 6, 2017 at 11:59 am
    Reply

    Thank you, this worked !!!!

  21. anom1234 said on May 20, 2018 at 11:20 pm
    Reply

    Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!

  22. JC said on October 12, 2020 at 2:14 pm
    Reply

    Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!

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