Changing the default forwarding behavior in Mozilla Thunderbird
Posted on 08 April 2008, at 1:02 pm, by Joel McLaughlin
I have recently started using Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail program for my e-mail coming into Gear Diary. It supports many protocols my favorite being IMAP.  Not to mention that it is multi platform running on Windows, Max OS X and of course Linux.
One annoying behavior that I’ve discovered about Thunderbird is it defaults to sending all e-mail forwards as attachments. In theory, nothing is wrong with this behavior, but it creates an attachment that ends in “.eml”. Some mail providers like Gear Diary’s provider will block this with their spam or virus detection software.
I did some poking around and discovered an easy, but obscure fix. First, go to Edit - Preferences then you need to go to the Advanced tab on the Preferences dialog and press the Config Editor button to being up Thunderbird’s configuration editor. In the Filter box, type in forward until you see the key in the screenshot below:
The default value, 0, means that Thunderbird will send e-mail forwards as attachments. This isn’t what I want, due my e-mail forwards to Judie being bounced!  Changing this to 2 will inline the forward message so that the e-mail gets out to anyone who have a provider with strict mail attachment rules.
When you forward a e-mail, it will look like this:
Now e-mail forwards will not bounce! 
- Judie Lipsett: I wish I had a little camper to send this to; it’s brilliant!
- BillChapman: @Judie: I read somewhere yesterday, that Amazon is reading version 2 for the Christmas season. From the...
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April 8th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Cool tip! I have recently switched to a Mac, and have been alternating between Thunderbird and the Mac Mail client. This forwarding one has annoyed me as well …
April 8th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Glad I could help. It’s annoyed me enough I HAD to find a solution!
April 8th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
There’s an easier way! And much easier to remember. Go to Tools > Options > Composition, General tab. First option is to set the forwarding behavior. Choose “inline” instead of “as attachment” and you’re all set. I agree that this is an annoying default setting. One of the first things I change when I install Tbird for someone.
The other thing I find truly puzzling in Tbird’s default setup is that it doesn’t highlight incoming high priority messages. By default the “Priority” column isn’t even showing! So I create an incoming filter to make all high priority messages be tagged as “Important.” That way they show up in red in my inbox, and catch my attention.
April 9th, 2008 at 3:15 am
-grins- what ballardelle said! But either ways probably change the same setting, so why not through the advanced config thing.
April 14th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Is there a way to get rid of the — Original message — and the table with the original email headers?
I find that it is annoying.
April 16th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Super-useful tip. Thanks! I have colleagues who have to use Outlook (poor souls), and the .eml attachments in my forwards weren’t opening correctly for them half of the time. Now, no problems.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
This only works if you manually forward a message unfortunately.
I have a rule set up that automatically forwards any incoming email to my gmail account, so I can view it on my phone. The problem lies in that the iPhone cannot view .eml attachments.
I could solve this by setting up imap, but I currently have a bunch of accounts through various websites I run - so it’s not very practical.
My whole reasoning for switching from outlook to thunderbird was to rid myself of issues with outlook. Until this issue is addressed, I cannot use thunderbird.
May 12th, 2008 at 5:53 am
Is there a way to get rid of the — Original message — and the table with the original email headers?
I find that it is annoying.
You can use Mail Redirect extension. Download it at: https://addons.mozilla.org/el/thunderbird/addon/550