Composing or editing an email or note in raw HTML?
 

I gather that composing or editing the raw HTML of an email or note in the FastMail Web interface is something that went away with the retirement of the Classic interface in mid-2017. Is that correct? Is there any reasonably accessible way to do this now?

Go to your settings, then preference and tick a few boxes.

Terry, unless you know something I do not, I am pretty sure there is no setting to enable editing of the raw HTML. Under Mail->Writing, the only relevant choice available is between plain text and rich text (in the latter case, allowing many formatting options, but no ability to edit the underlying HTML). The advanced preferences also have nothing relevant.

Thanks for pointing that out, my bad I was thinking of rich text....:D

Oh well at least now the Op knows now there is no option.

It would sure be nice if editing the raw HTML of emails and/or notes was a feature available in the FM Web interface. I wonder... have those in charge of the platform made an affirmative decision not to provide such a feature anymore? Or are they ambivalent about it, and haven't perceived sufficient interest in the feature to justify dedicating the resources necessary to implement and support it?

I'd like to respectfully request a comment on this from Rob M., Bron G., Rob N., or someone in a comparable position of behind-the-scenes knowledge of FastMail's operations and roadmap.

– – –

Otherwise, perhaps there's some browser extension or other that might make this sort of thing feasible, for those interested? Any suggestions?

Thanks,
~ Justin

(Proud to be a loyal, paying user of FastMail since 2002!)

Fastmail Squire HTML editor and pasting into compose screen message body
 

Remember that HTML in an email isn't exactly the same as HTML support for web pages. For example, there are security implications for code you send in an email which is running in the browser of a recipient.

Back in 2014, Fastmail programmers created a new open source HTML5 rich text editor intended for emails and documents (Squire). Fastmail uses Squire for both the email rich text compose page and the notes rich text compose page. You can read the Fastmail blog about Squire at:
Squire: FastMail's rich text editor

I find this editor sufficient for anything I want to put into an email or a note. But you can paste other contents into a rich text (HTML) Fastmail compose body and it will usually be rendered pretty well when sent as an email. For example, you can copy/paste the contents of this EMD page into the Fastmail Compose body area (using ctl-A, ctl-C, then ctl-V or mouse right-click select all, copy and paste). You can then use the Fastmail embedded Squire editor to modify what you pasted.

Pasting into a Fastmail HTML Compose message body works pretty well. I paste formatted text and images into a new message quite often. If you perform an online search for "online HTML editor" you will find various HTML editors and you can paste the rendered contents into a Fastmail Compose page.

Bill

They announced Squire 2.0 in February 2023, here are the links to the GitHub repo and to the NPM package.

When I want to edit the raw html code while composing an email message what I so is right-click where I want to edit the code, select "Inspect (Q)" (that's on Firefox; in other browsers it may be called something else), the select a node that contains the part I want to edit, right-click and select "Edit as html" and edit the code.
It has an advantage over just editing the html of the entire message (something that was available in Fastmail's rich text editor about a decade ago but is no longer available) in that I need to see just a portion of the code of the message, instead of searching the code of the whole message to find the portion I want to edit. It has the disadvantage that it's a hack: nobody promises that it will continue to work this way, and using debugging tools is a sort of crooked way to compose email. But it works. I usually do it in rare occasions when I need things like sub-subscripts in math formulas (things that no html editor provides natively).