✉️ Drafting emails in Markdown

2026-07-24 · markdown, email, communication, tools, productivity, writing, ai

As developers, we use Markdown all the time: in documentation, GitHub issues, etc. Pretty much every tool supports it now, except email. With email, we are still stuck with a 2005 MS Word experience.

Why Markdown? Once you know the simple syntax, composing Markdown is super fast. It is much faster than finding and clicking on buttons in a rich text editor. And the result is much more effective than simple text. Readers can scan the message quickly by looking at headings, and information is formatted cleanly. Formatted text is more effective communication.

I use Thunderbird, and the Markdown plugin I was using went unmaintained. So I turned Claude onto making a new one. The result is Thunderbird Markdown Compose. This plugin has some nice features:

Simple, so easy to maintain
Converts pasted rich text to Markdown for easy editing
Can be quickly turned off
Provides a simple way to scale images
Mixes nicely with the previous message in replies

See the demo video.