remove extra spacing in thunderbird 05. Jan 2009
Thunderbird displays nasty extra spacing above and below quotes in the compose window. This lures the author into thinking his mail is nicely spaced, but in reality it isn’t. What looks nice on the senders side looks totally cramped on the recipients side.
Here is a simple demonstration.
The compose window normally looks like this.
There are no blank lines inserted whatsoever, the spacing comes solely from Thunderbirds misleading stylesheet. The awful awakening comes, when recipient of the mail opens it in his mail client.
Pretty ugly, huh? Okay if you think this is bad, then take a look at how it looks in a webmailer.
Illegible! Terrible! No one wants to read mails that look like that. Now let’s apply a little patch. The compose window without blank lines now looks like this.
Looks bad? Great, that’s what it’s supposed to! What you see there is a much more realistic preview of the mail. This ugly looking mail now drives you into inserting blank lines which is exactly what you should be doing. After inserting the blank lines the compose window looks like this.
The recipient now sees this.
Much better! Reading is no longer a pain. Now see how the webmailer displays the mail.
Wonderful! Beautiful! The way it always should have been. No more ugly illegible mails!
To remove the nasty extra spacing above and below quotes in Thunderbird’s compose window just insert the following snippet into your userContent.css.
blockquote[type=cite] {
margin-top: 0 !important;
margin-bottom: 0 !important;
}
blockquote pre {
margin-top: 0 !important;
margin-bottom: 0 !important;
}
For more background information read the posting on Mozillazine. Interestingly this problem persists since at least five years but no one in the Mozilla team has seemed to care about fixing it.
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