I have been using Thunderbird for years on my Windows and Linux computers. It is a fantastic email client. As of today I am using version 57.0.2.

One thing that has puzzled me for a long time about Thunderbird is why  there was not an easy way to switch from HTML to plain text when writing a message. It does not happen often for me, but sometimes I just want to write a simple plain text message. There is no prompt in the Thunderbird menu system to do this. Right-clicking in the message area does not provide a way. I cannot find an icon for this in a toolbar. This has been frustrating to say the least. 

Well it turns out there is a very simple way to switch from HTML to plain text on a per message basis. Just press and hold the “Shift” key when clicking on “Write” in the menu bar.

I knew it had to be easy, but it took me a number of Google searches to find this solution. Maybe posting this in my blog will help get the word out to all my fellow Thunderbird fans.