Hello,

in KMail, I'm trying to switch between HTML and plain text views by clicking on the vertical "HTML Message" bar. The pointer changes to a hand symbol, but when I click the bar, nothing happens.

I'm on KDE neon with Plasma 5.13, all updates installed.

How can I switch between HTML and plain text views?

Thanks,

bovender

While I'm not sure why you KMail won't let you change on the fly by clicking the vertical bar (which should work), but if it's helpful, you can configure specific folders to prefer HTML to plain text.

Right click on the desired folder (such as your Inbox), then "Folder Properties" -> "View" tab - > and update the "Message Default Format" as desired.

Of course this can be changed at the mailbox and global levels, but I figured editing at the folder level is the workaround closest to what you're trying to accomplish.

Thanks for the advice. I played around with the message display settings and made two interesting observations:

1. The per-folder setting is ignored on my system.
2. The HTML status bar becomes clickable and actually does change the message display, but only if the global Security setting is not "Prefer HTML to plain text".

I must admit that the majority of mails that I receive does not need to be displayed as HTML, so I use that as default global setting now and click on the status bar to switch to HTML view for all messages that are hard to read in plain text (most notably, tables of contents of scientific journals such as Nature, which over time have improved their styling a lot, making it much easier to consume the information with HTML view).

A keyboard shortcut to switch between the two view modes on a per-message level would be great. (For me, it would not need to stick with the message.)