Hmm you can! Was there something specific about that copy and paste you wanted to ask about.

I have just created a new message, added a table, and selected it. When I right click on it I see a menu with the Cut and Copy options greyed out If I press Control-C, and then Control-V in a new part of the message, nothing happens. On these grounds I think Thunderbird does not support the copying and pasting of tables, but if you know a way to do it I will be grateful if you would let me know.

My apologies. If I select a cell in a table, right-click, and choose the Select All item in the pop up menu I can then copy and paste the whole table. Slightly weird operability but it works. Strangely, the border colour is not copied across.

My apologies. If I select a cell in a table, right-click, and choose the Select All item in the pop up menu I can then copy and paste the whole table. Slightly weird operability but it works. Strangely, the border colour is not copied across.

I went to the trouble of looking at tables copied from Excel at one point as most of the formatting did not arrive in Thunderbird. I though that was a poor showing of what you see is what you get. What I found was Excel only put the basic table and data on the clipboard as HTML it put everything on the clipboard in RTF. Thunderbird defaults to picking plain text or HTML. I would not put it past Thunderbird to also leave out the styling. Personally I do not use grids in emails unless I am desperate as they generally present particularly poorly on phone screens. Lots and lots of left and right scrolling as the screen is so much smaller that the desktop.

Matt, I have very little use for tables as such in email messages. I do have three email recipients who use crappy email clients that don't show HTML quotations properly. When I'm sending quotations to these people I put them in single-cell tables with nice borders, that way everyone is happy. Instead of setting up a table from scratch for each quotation I want to keep a table in my templates folder and just paste it into the emails I'm writing. I set the table border colour in Thunderbird with HTML, so the bird's lack of facility with RTF shouldn't be an issue.