Imported emails display in HTML

J William (Bill) Smith · February 12th, 2004, 1:57 am

I want to migrate from Eudora, and have successfully imported addresbooks and mail. However, some of the mail I can read in plain text, others, from the same source, display in HTML. If I forward the HTML displayed mail from Eudora, it arrives in plain text. Is there a setting I can tweak to have the imported HTML files read as plain text without having to forawrd seveal hundred email to Thundervird from Eidora?

Bill

Post by **tanstaafl** » February 12th, 2004, 2:19 am

You can use "View->Message body as" to specify whether thunderbird should display a html message as original html (unmodified html), simple html (partially stripped html), or plain text (all of the html stripped out).

In some of the 0.4 thunderbird builds changing that setting had no effect until you reran thunderbird. Thats been fixed in 0.5.

If you use "View->Message body as ->plain text" in 0.5 and it looks its displaying raw HTML code thats due to thunderbird not recognizing the message is html. That can ocur if a pair of html tags don't use the same case. Nothing to do with importing, its a parsing bug. I've only seen it a couple of times.

Let me know if I misunderstood the question.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » February 12th, 2004, 2:48 am

I think you understood the question. I tried the suggestion and the were marked as html. However, choosing plain text made no difference. I tried it on several emails from differing sources.

Bill

Post by **tanstaafl** » February 12th, 2004, 3:23 am

I found a 'killhtml' program you could try on a copy of a mbox to see if it will strip all of the HTML tags from all of the messages in that folder without any harmfull sideffects. There's probably lots of PERL scripts available that will do the same thing, but I'd expect this program to be easier to use.

http://www.webattack.com/get/killhtml.html

Guest · Post by **Guest** » February 12th, 2004, 3:38 am

Thanks I'll give it a try