Yes, I can confirm this. As a workaround, select all, Insert/HTML..., select the named anchor code, Delete, Insert. Or, select a named anchor in the message body, right-click, Cut.

sfhowes said

Yes, I can confirm this. As a workaround, select all, Insert/HTML..., select the named anchor code, Delete, Insert. Or, select a named anchor in the message body, right-click, Cut.

Thank you for your help. I tried this but it didn't work, so let me break this down to make sure I understand you correctly.

-Copy and Paste text into email body -Select the newly pasted text -Click Insert->HTML

I might be getting confused during the next steps... You said, Select the named anchor code, Delete, Insert." Do you mean I'm supposed to find the actual part of the code, produced by selecting HTML, that refers to the anchor code?

The thing is, my pasted text is littered with anchors, so it's not an easy thing to locate, delete, etc. Anyway, just let me know whenever you can. Thanks!

Hopefully this problem will be fixed in a future Thunderbird upgrade... If not, I might not be able to use it, since I reconfigured it just so I could copy and paste this kind of text for emails.

Thanks again...

When the Insert HTML window is open, the named anchors are identified by the "a name=" tags (see picture). Deleting the tags and the linked text is easy enough if there only a few, or selecting the anchor icon, Right-click, Cut (see picture). TB has very limited HTML editing options, and I think named anchors are fairly infrequent in email. Perhaps you could first copy your html into a full html editor and do a global delete of named anchors.

There are TB add-ons that provide better html editing, such as ThunderHTMLedit and EditHtml.

You may wish to submit a bug report to see if there's any chance of this being fixed.

Thanks so much for your help with this -- I greatly appreciate it.

Unfortunately, I don't think this might work only because there are so many anchors throughout the text. So let me ask this...

Like I said in my initial post, there's a bunch of formatted text that I'd like to maintain, but I'd like to avoid any emergent issues (e.g., anchors, etc.). Would you suggest that I do something else to the text itself before I pasted it into the body of the email that might help offset any such problems?

Thanks again for all of your help. And yes, I'll look into filing a report as well!

The only thing I can think of is to Paste Without Formatting (Ctrl+Shift+V) when you copy content with named anchors or other unwanted formatting. You really can't expect TB to have the kind of compatibility with external editors as there is with, e.g. Word and Outlook. Maybe you're better off attaching material with lots of formatting in a format such as pdf.

Thanks very much...

So, this is the conundrum I'm facing: I'm using Thunderbird to send emails to federal agencies that require the formatting I'm seeking, and also prohibit the use of PDFs -- or any kind of attachment, for that mater. Hence my questions about all of this...

That's also why I thought there might be a way to "scrub" a document, before pasting it into the email body, so that it retains the style while eliminating any glitches (if such a thing is possible).

Thanks again for your help.