Write Markdown in Postbox (again)

It's beyond me, that there is almost no1 email client that offers Markdown to compose email messages and then turn it to HTML once you send it.

If you send plain text emails and want to emphasis a word you used something like this to make text **bold** and depending on the mail client that received the mail, it would even appear bold.

For Markdown it's the same, so it would be natural to compose plain text emails with the limited set of Markdown formatting like the following:

Hi everyone,

please be aware of the following:

# Agenda

-
please
- bring
- your
- code editor

and a Javascript file with the following content:

\```js
  const js = true;
\```

## More Agenda

*
Bullet
* [Points](https://github.com)

and then on send, convert it to html with nice syntaxhighlighting and be done.

Given. We don't know how this email arrives on the other side and how messed up the response of this HTML email will be, but this is about my experience! :)

Thanks to the open Mozilla Thunderbird email client with the option to install extensions, Thunderbird was able to convert markdown to nice HTML with the extension Markdown here, that alo allowed the conversion of Markdown in textareas in the browser.

And thanks to Postbox, the email client of my choice, being a fork of Thunderbird, Markdown here worked flawlessly in Postbox until it didn't.

Thunderbird changed their extension interface, Postbox just dropped extensions all together and I was left with their awful html editor. Nobody wants to edit html in an email.

So I was subscribing to the github issues of Markdown here and was hoping someone would make the extension work in Thunderbird and maybe with some tweaks it would work in Postbox as well.

TL;DR

Yesterday the notification came:

There has been some work from the community on a Markdown Here plugin for Thunderbird 68+, which is documented here at Support Thunderbird 68 #577. Even though this plugin doesn't seem to function anymore in Thunderbird 78+, I have found out that it works almost flawlessly in Postbox 7.0.30. There are at least two plugins for Thunderbird 68+ that work in Postbox 7.0.30:

https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/issues/580#issuecomment-700049522

Oh yeah! It does work indeed! Markdown in Postbox 7, three years or so later.

The settings window is kind of messed up, but for basic plug'n'play, it works fine (I installed this one: https://github.com/neilmayhew/markdown-here/releases/download/v2.13.4-community/markdown-here-v2.13.4-community.xpi)

So if you are in need of this functionality, keep an eye on this thread!


  1. There is a MacOS Client that lets you write Markdown natively.