Home > Blog > Make your emails more colorful

Make your emails more colorful
1 star2 stars3 stars4 stars5 stars
(no votes yet)
Loading ... Loading ...

January 14th, 2010 Leave a comment Go to comments

I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my e-mail client and I prefer plain-text messages over HTML format. When you view a threaded conversation it looks like this:

I found a little hack on Mozilla website which adds different colors for various quote levels in messages. Unfortunately the example is no longer valid for Thunderbird 3, because the default color scheme had changed. I modified the CSS to fit the new look and ended up with this:

If you like it, just run the following code to have it applied:

cd ~/.thunderbird/*.default
mkdir chrome
cat <<EOF > chrome/userContent.css
/* Quote Levels Colors */
/* bar color: #729fcf */
blockquote[type=cite] {
    color: #394f67 !important;
    background-color: #edf3f9 !important;
}
/* bar color: #ad7fa8 */
blockquote[type=cite] blockquote {
    color: #563f54 !important;
    background-color: #f4eff4 !important;
}
/* bar color: #8ae234 */
blockquote[type=cite] blockquote blockquote {
    color: #45711a !important;
    background-color: #f0fbe5 !important;
}
/* bar color: #fcaf3e */
blockquote[type=cite] blockquote blockquote blockquote {
    color: #7e571f !important;
    background-color: #fef5e6 !important;
}
/* bar color: #e9b96e */
blockquote[type=cite] blockquote blockquote blockquote blockquote {
    color: #745c37 !important;
    background-color: #fcf6ec !important;
}
EOF

Don’t forget to restart Thunderbird! :-)

  1. etank
    January 15th, 2010 at 02:23 | #1 | Firefox 3.5.6Fedora 12

    Excellent. Works and looks great.

  2. January 15th, 2010 at 10:00 | #2 | Firefox 3.5.6Fedora 12

    Very nice, thank you!

  3. slipszi
    January 15th, 2010 at 11:57 | #3 | Firefox 3.5.7Ubuntu 9.10

    You could just use this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/170

  1. March 23rd, 2010 at 07:40 | #1 | WordPress 2.8.1
or