Question

How do you remove all formatting tags when calling:

GmailApp.getInboxThreads()[0].getMessages()[0].getBody()

such that the only remainder of text is that which can be read.

Formatting can be destroyed; the text in the body is only needed to be parsed, but tags such as:

"&" 
<br>

and possibly others, need to be removed.

Answer 1

I am not sure what you mean by .getBody() – is this supposed to return a DOM body element?

However, the simplest solution for removing HTML tags is probably to let the browser render the HTML and ask him for the text content:

var myHTMLContent = "hello &amp; world <br />!";
var tempDiv = document.createElement('div');
tempDiv.innerHTML = myHTMLContent;

// retrieve the cleaned content:
var textContent = tempDiv.innerText;

With the above example, the textContent variable will contain the text

"hello & world
!"

(Note the line break due to the <br /> tag.)