1302106 - set "no background color" for composed messages

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Thomas Wolff]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0 SeaMonkey/2.40
Build ID: 20160120202951

Steps to reproduce:

Options - Composition - Background color:
trying to clear background color, so that no color is set in the email


Actual results:

no such option, selecting a specific background color is enforced


Expected results:

I am aware of config option msgcompose.background_color which can be set to empty.
This should be an option in the config GUI as well.
It is quite obtrusive to enforce a certain background color on an email (especially a bright white which a number of people associate with snow-blind) while the recipient's browser has an option to set a reading background color which is then disrespected.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

A missing UI option is hardly a major problem. In fact, this is an enhancement.

Richard, are you interested? We could add "no background colour" somewhere in the UI. Or put "No colour" as a button below all the colours in the palette.

Comment 2

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Thomas, you want to send HTML messages, true? Because on plain text messages where are no color settings sent.

Setting no background-color, or transparent, and only setting the text color can lead to unexpected results. What if you have set black as text color and no background and the recipient uses black as default background color? Then he sees nothing.

Comment 3

[Thomas Wolff]

Sure, so the option should be "no color" (meaning "recipient's default color") for both foreground and background.

Comment 4

[Adrian Wilkins]

Workaround : you can do this by using the config editor and setting the following to an empty string.

msgcompose.background_color
msgcompose.text_color

This makes Thunderbird consistent with the default in most other HTML composing email clients, which is to not specifically state a color for either.

Now both my view and compose windows respect the styles in userContent.css, and I only get white backgrounds when the sender has explicitly set styles, which is usually only in (badly designed) email signatures.