By default, HTML paragraphs have a top and bottom margin. You could consider removing the paragraphs before you paste. To do that, you can try this in Word:

Call up Replace (Crl+h)

Find what: ^p {that's a shift-6 and lower case P}

Replace with: ^l {that's a shift-6 and lower case L}

Click Replace All

When you copy/paste, the line breaks should remain as shown in Word.

To restore your Word document, in Word, Undo.

Note: if you do not see the difference between paragraph breaks and line breaks in Word, you can turn them on using the Show Formatting button (¶) on the Home tab of the ribbon (at least as of Word 2010).

dmnorth sanoi

Thunderbird changes font and inserts extra blank lines. This is unacceptable. I can change font, but I can't remove the spaces.

I have the exact same issue with OpenOffice and LibreOffice on Windows. I have reported the problem in BugZilla, but I think that forum is pretty dead:

Copy pasting from OpenOffice/LibreOffice to Thunderbird overrides unchecked option "Use Paragraph format instead of Body Text by default" https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1425661

LibreOfficejscher2000 sanoi

Call up Replace (Crl+h) Find what: ^p {that's a shift-6 and lower case P} Replace with: ^l {that's a shift-6 and lower case L} Click Replace All When you copy/paste, the line breaks should remain as shown in Word. To restore your Word document, in Word, Undo.

This did not help at all.

Seriously this issue is huge. Let's say I have a text (written in OpenOffice/LibreOffice) that is 3000 words long and includes: 30 links, texts that are bolded, unordered lists etc.

And I wish to send this text to 20 different people. And I want to change the introduction of the text slightly for all these different people. I just cannot "Paste Without Formatting", because it requires tremendous work to get that formatting then correct.

This bug almost makes the Thunderbird email client unusable. This serious bug needs to be fixed!

I have reported the issue also in LibreOffice and OpenOffice BugZillas, in case the problem is partly due to their software. Here are the issues I have posted

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1425661 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114501 https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=127633

Maybe you can do the same for MSWord and report about this bug to their website?