For more than three years now, I have been written most of my emails in Markdown! How so? I have been using the Markdown Here add-on for Thunderbird. As explained in the ‘features’ page of the extension website:

Markdown Here is an extension for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Thunderbird, and Postbox. With it, you can write email in Markdown, and then click a button (or context menu item, or use a hotkey) to render the email into good-looking, fully formatted text (HTML, technically).

It adds an button that I can click on to render Markdown in HTML, making my email looking pretty good, check out the screencast ⬇️

The only issue that I have encountered so far, is that it’s not super easy to find a working Markdown Here add-on for newer Thunderbird versions, and when I switched to Thunderbird 78 (current version below, for clarity) I struggled once again.

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$ thunderbird -v   
Thunderbird 78.6.1

The reason for this is actually quite simple, Adam Pritchard, the creator of the extension, has disappeared (see issue #644 on GitHub). So when comes a new version of Thunderbird, I can only hope that someone with the right skills will be able to update the existing code to support the newer version of Thunderbird. Fortunately, this time, Rob Lemley, a.k.a. jfx2006 (who is part of the Thunderbird core development team) came to the rescue. He added Thunderbird 78 support in his fork and released a working add-on (.xpi file). So now I am very pleased to use Markdown Here, along with the great features brought by Thunderbird 78.

Looks like many people are using Markdown Here (~50k stars on GitHub is a lot) and now, at least one member of the Thunderbird core development is aware of the enthusiasm of the community for this extension. That is why I am hoping that such feature will eventually be part of the application it-self (I may be just hoping too much here). Anyway, Markdown Here is a great extension and I am extremely grateful to Adam Pritchard, wherever he is!