skwire - thanks for your AHK script.  Though your script was not what I originally had in mind, I can use it with 4wd's greasemonkey user script and get even more functionality than I had originally bargained for.

I ended up getting 2 snacks for the price of one.

 

This works!  Awesome :up: 

I hope others can find this useful.

I have tried it out and it works great.  The only improvement I can think of for it would be to also recognize email addresses that are linked, but I am happy the way it is! 

THANK YOU 4wd!!!!!

I've sometimes used a Firefox extension that copies HTML as HTML into the Notetab editor, and using Notetab's built-in feature to strip HTML but retain URLs, though still have to add the URL of the page itself as a separate operation.

I have thought of doing this but would really like a more simple solution.  I do like Notetab, but don't have a license for the pro version, and feel limited by the non-unlimited undo of notetab light.  I like Notepad++ and Editor².  I'm sure there are many notepad replacements and other programs that have HTML stripping functions where I could do as you described, this may be my only option if I can't get something else to work. 

html2text: you might also like Nir Sofer's freeware HTMLAsText, which can also be run from the command line if required.

I did notice this program in my searching.  It appears the HTML must be saved as a file before this can be used.  Again, a good program, but I would really like to do this a with basic copy and paste action or something similar.  Perhaps I could write a script that would temporarily save the HTML snippet as a file, process it with HTMLAsText, then copy the converted text ready to be pasted?  I don't know if I can do this with your other suggestion, Clipboard Help+Spell.   I'll have to look into it.  From the surface it doesn't look like it can easily be done.