Make emails readable: store & render the HTML (or at least render markdown)

[jjpshorg]

Hi,

The issue. Emails in Twenty are often unreadable. The reader shows the raw stored text, with no rendering — you see markdown syntax and sender artifacts, for example:

• [Privacy policy](https://example.com/privacy) — marketing tools;
• Sent with [Mail App](https://example.com) — a signature added by the sender's mail app;
• tracking URLs wrapped in < > — bulk emails.

Why. Twenty only stores the text version of the message (text): the email's text part when present, otherwise an HTML-to-text conversion. And the reader renders that text as-is (pre-line + auto-linkify), interpreting neither markdown nor HTML.

What we'd need.

1. Store the message HTML (in addition to the text) and render it (sanitized) in the reader — that's what an email client does;
2. failing that: render the markdown of the stored text;
3. ideally: an "Open in Gmail" action per message.

Use case. Our exchanges (sponsors, partners, customers) are tracked in Twenty; if emails are unreadable there, we have to go back to Gmail to read them — which defeats the point of centralizing.

Thanks!

[1soka]

Good writeup. A few pointers from the code for whoever picks this up.

The reader is EmailThreadMessageBody.tsx: it puts message.text in a div with white-space: pre-line and wraps it with linkify-react, so whatever the sender wrote in the text/plain part shows up as is. On the import side, parse-and-format-gmail-message.util.ts sends the body to extractMessageTextWithoutQuotedHistory, which prefers the text part and only falls back to convertHtmlToText for HTML only emails. The HTML is never kept. That's the root cause already noted in #25894, which was closed and pointed to #25509 (same need, for images).

One thing that makes option 1 bigger than it looks: the quoted history stripping (strip-quoted-history.util.ts) works line by line on text. If the HTML gets stored and rendered, it needs its own quote removal (Gmail's div.gmail_quote, Outlook's #divRplyFwdMsg, blockquote type="cite" from Apple Mail), otherwise every message in a thread shows the whole conversation again. Remote images should probably be blocked by default too, because of tracking pixels. The front already has a sanitizeHtmlPreview util that could be a starting point, but it removes <style>, which most HTML emails depend on. Rendering in a sandboxed iframe without allow-scripts would keep the styles and stop the email CSS from leaking into the app.

Option 2 worries me a bit as written: the text part isn't really markdown, so a full markdown renderer would also turn *, _ or 1. in normal emails into formatting. A smaller quick win would be to handle only the two patterns from your examples in the reader: [label](https://...) rendered as a link showing the label, and <https://...> shown without the brackets. That's a frontend only change and covers Proton signatures and most marketing footers.

For option 3 the data is already there: messageChannelMessageAssociation.messageExternalId is the Gmail message id, and message.headerMessageId is the Message-ID header. Something like https://mail.google.com/mail/?authuser=<account email>#search/rfc822msgid:<headerMessageId> (URL encoded) opens the right message even when several Google accounts are signed in.

[BOHEUS]

Emails are planned to be imported with HTML support