How do I cut-and-paste an email, so that paste will be in pure text (stripping all html)
What I usually do is paste the text into notepad then copy it again before pasting it elsewhere. That should also remove any font styles and colors applied to the text.
As mentioned above, you can use Notepad as a middleman for the text, or if you run Windows and you need to do this a lot, it may be easier to download a program called PureText that does the same thing.
There are nearly a million other of these scripts, but PureText seems to be the most configurable and GUI-hugging.