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Writing mail: formats and signatures

Drafts save themselves

What you write is kept in Drafts as you go: two seconds after you stop typing, at least every 15 seconds while you write, and at once when you switch to another tab or app, close the window or start another message. The time of the last save shows next to Save draft. If an address is not valid, the draft waits to be saved and says which address to fix; closing the page with unsaved changes asks first. Open the draft from Drafts to carry on, on any device.

Formats

Pick how to write each message from the menu next to Save draft:

• Rich text (the default): a toolbar for bold, italic, underline, strike-through, headings, quotes, bulleted and numbered lists and links. Keyboard shortcuts work too (Ctrl+B or ⌘B, and so on).
• Plain text: just text, sent as plain text only.
• Markdown: write **bold**, *italic*, # Heading, - list, 1. list, > quote, code , [text](https://…) and fenced code blocks. Preview shows how it will look. The message goes out as formatted HTML, with your Markdown as the plain-text copy.
• HTML source: write the HTML yourself, with Preview to check it.

Rich text, Markdown and HTML messages are sent with a plain-text copy, so mail apps that cannot show HTML still show the message.

Switching format converts what you have written. Going from rich text or HTML to plain text or Markdown removes the formatting, and webmail asks first.

To choose the format new messages start in, open Settings, then Writing. That choice is kept in your browser.

What you can paste

Pasted text keeps simple formatting: bold, italic, lists, quotes, headings and links. Colours, fonts, images, tables and anything that could run code are taken out. To send a picture, attach it.

Sender names and signatures

In Settings, Names and signatures lists each of your addresses (your own and any aliases). For each one you can set:

• Sender name: the name people see next to your address.
• Plain-text signature: used for plain-text and Markdown messages, below a line with -- , which most mail apps recognise.
• Formatted signature: used for rich-text and HTML messages. Leave it empty to use the plain-text one.

New messages, replies and forwards start with the signature of the address they are sent from, above any quoted text. When you change From, the signature changes with it.

These settings belong to your account, so they follow you to any browser, and JMAP mail apps can read and change them through Identity/get and Identity/set.

Limits

A sender name is one line of up to 200 characters. A plain-text signature can have up to 4,000 characters and a formatted one up to 20,000.