How to clean up emails when replying in plain text? I have a problem that I want to solve after many years of using Mac OS X Mail.app... I generally like to send plain text emails that are full width (format=flowed) and nicely indented for quote levels. When I receive emails that are in HTML my problems begin. I have the option of switching them into plain text before I hit reply (using alt+cmd+p) or after I hit reply (using shift+cmd+t). Please no replies telling me to answer rich text emails with rich text replies. I want my cake on this one.

If I switch to plain text before then generally the plain text will be wrapped to a specific width and also, in some cases I'll get lots of ">" where there should be vertical line quote indents.

If I switch to plain text after then I may loose a lot of the quoting levels. What I want is to be able to end up with clean flowed plain text replies with nice quote levels. 

Has anybody else seen this behaviour or seen a plugin/app that can solve these issues?
I haven't seen a good universal solution, but have found that by selecting only the bare minimum text I need to reply to, I can often get a clean, clear reply that doesn't need substantial (or even any) clean up when replying in plain text.

Sadly, the best solution for presenting these emails cleanly is a powerful email client like elm. BBedit, Safari's reader and Coda 2 are all in my toolchain for taking a complicated HTML document and thinning it down but it's awkward to send the text to a second program, operate on the document and then get it back into a reply using Mail. 

I wish I could serve you up a delicious cake of a plug in, but sadly, the Mail plug in scene isn't lucrative and this use case doesn't have a champion that's programming a better converter than the one Apple has provided.

Of the reviews of plug-ins, these are the best:


http://www.tikouka.net/mailapp/
http://www.macworld.com/product/collection/6866/mailaddons.html


And if QuoteFix won't work for you, you may have to program this yourself. It might do the trick by deleting trailing spaces, but without a sample of your mail in question, it's hard to tell.