Attachments are attachments to the email and they can be images, documents etc.. Nothing to do with Plain Text.

You need to ask yourself a couple of questions. Do you want to always compose in Plain text or only now and again? Do you only want to send in Plain text or perhaps only send in Plain Text to a specific person/email address ?

How to compose a plain text email.: If you always want to compose in Plain Text: Tools > Account Settings > Composition & Addressing or right click on maila ccount in Folder pane and select 'Settings' then select 'Composition & Addressing' for the mail account. uncheck 'compose messages in HTML format' click on OK

If you want ot compose in HTML but also Plain Text on occasions: select: 'compose messages in HTML format' click on OK

Then press 'Shift' and click on 'Write' button It will only allow you to compose in Plain Text for that email.

Re: Sending option. As you may want to send in HTML and Plain Text, you should have that selected here: Tools > Options > Composition or Menu icon > Options > Options > Composition

click on 'Send options' button select : Send the message in both plain text and HTML click on OK click on OK

If you have a specific contact you always want to send Plain Text. open Address Book locate the contact and double click to open the 'Edit Contact' pop up window. on the 'Contact' tab 'Prefers to receive messages formatted as: select 'Plain Text' click on OK

Now everything is set up. So if you usually use HTML, use the Shift + Write to get into Plain Text mode. Now that the contact has been set up to receive Plain Text, it will only be sent plain text.

I just use Thunderbird for sending plain text emails. Otherwise I'd use the gmail web app. I managed to get my txt and makefiles to attach as plain text, but I can't get c files to attach as plain text.

Toad-Hall said

Attachments are attachments to the email and they can be images, documents etc.. Nothing to do with Plain Text. You need to ask yourself a couple of questions. Do you want to always compose in Plain text or only now and again? Do you only want to send in Plain text or perhaps only send in Plain Text to a specific person/email address ? How to compose a plain text email.: If you always want to compose in Plain Text: Tools > Account Settings > Composition & Addressing or right click on maila ccount in Folder pane and select 'Settings' then select 'Composition & Addressing' for the mail account. uncheck 'compose messages in HTML format' click on OK If you want ot compose in HTML but also Plain Text on occasions: select: 'compose messages in HTML format' click on OK Then press 'Shift' and click on 'Write' button It will only allow you to compose in Plain Text for that email.

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Re: Sending option. As you may want to send in HTML and Plain Text, you should have that selected here: Tools > Options > Composition or Menu icon > Options > Options > Composition

click on 'Send options' button select : Send the message in both plain text and HTML click on OK click on OK

If you have a specific contact you always want to send Plain Text. open Address Book locate the contact and double click to open the 'Edit Contact' pop up window. on the 'Contact' tab 'Prefers to receive messages formatted as: select 'Plain Text' click on OK

Now everything is set up. So if you usually use HTML, use the Shift + Write to get into Plain Text mode. Now that the contact has been set up to receive Plain Text, it will only be sent plain text.

It's base64 that's the problem with the attachments. I need to change the encoding for attachments, so the script I'm sending c code to can interpret it.

What is being used at the receiving end? Any reasonably competent mail client should be able to handle regular email encoding. If base-64 is not acceptable then I guess whatever you're using doesn't have the capability to decode it?

Are your troublesome source files encoded using UTF-8? I believe this will prompt Thunderbird into using base-64 in order to be able to encode any character it may encounter.

Unfortunately, here, I haven't been able to coerce my editor into saving in any encoding other than UTF-8 to check this.

http://superuser.com/questions/766269/how-to-change-content-transfer-encoding-for-email-attachments

Well, I found an editor that let me select "Western" (aka Latin) encoding and the attachments are now in plain text:

name="text.c"

filename="text.c"

name="text.cpp"

filename="text.cpp"

name="text.mak"

filename="text.mak"

name="text.txt"

filename="text.txt"

I hadn't known there are specific mime types for c and c++ source, and makefiles!

The last one is a puzzle, as I set it to be saved using "western" and the text editor confirms it is "western" when re-opened, yet in Thunderbird it is declared to be using UTF-8 charset. However, it is encoded into the message in plain text, as you can see, but this makes a considerable hole in my theory about UTF-8 being the source of the problem.

I think the "7bit" is the key to this; if it's 7 bits then it's effectively ASCII and no special encoding is required to transmit it verbatim via email. Any possibility of 8 bits or "wide characters" and Thunderbird would be obliged to use base-64 or some similar encoding to represent it using 7 bit characters.

So, just use something like Sublime to edit the email, or is Nano more appropriate?

Edit the email? How would that work?

I edited the files to be sent as attachments, so they would be suitable for and compatible with 7-bit encoding. That appears to mean avoiding UTF-8 which seems a somewhat backward step.

I mean which editor were you using to change the file encoding.

I looked at vim but couldn't find a setting (can't believe there isn't one!) Bluefish offered one but it didn't seem to "take". I ended up using the stock "text editor" which on LMDE is named pluma. I'm not familiar with the two you mentioned; we must be using rather different distros.

On Windows, I'd have tried Notepad++ too.