Receiving Forwarded Emails as Attachments

[BobH]

I've noticed lately that I'm receiving many emails forwarded to my by friends as attachments which must be opened to read the forwarded content. Some of these correspondents use Thunderbird and some use Outlook. I open them in Thunderbird 24.1.1. It used to be that the email content was displayed when I opened it from the TB in box. Now I must open the attachment.

Can anyone explain why this is happening?

[Rudi]

Maybe your friends are dragging an email they received into the body of a new message, thus creating an attached message? Maybe you should find out from your friends if they are indeed doing this. I cannot see how a message can automatically convert into an attachment if they simply used the forward process.

[StuartR]

If people are using Outlook then there is a configuration setting to determine whether forwarded emails are included in the message or attached to it.

[BobH]

Aha! Thank you, Stuart!

Because I do not use Outlook I do not have it installed on my computer. I suspected that there might be a setting somewhere that was causing this. I have not found one in Thunderbird, but I'm reassured now that you pointed out the setting in Outlook.

[jonwallace]

In Thunderbird, this is configured in Options->Advanced->Config editor. Look for a pref called mail.forward_message_mode (or create it if it isn't there) and set it to:
0 to Forward an e-mail as attachment by default.
2 to Forward an e-mail inline by default.

found the setting in my about:config and the details here http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mail_and_news_settings" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[BobH]

Thank you, kindly, John!

I don't mess about in the config files for TB much, but I'll take a look at that.