nerd. links – Make Thunderbird Quote Headers in Replies

Inspired by Tech Chick (aka Gabrielle Atticus), I’ve decided to start listing some interesting if well-hidden sites on the internet so this will be the first in a series of nerd. links.

This one resolves a long-standing issue with Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client, ie the way it forwards messages.  Whereas Outlook, Outlook Express etc. forward some headers (to, from, subject, date etc) all you ever get in Thunderbird is “Sendername said:”.  It’s pretty pathetic really, especially the fact that there’s no date.

Luckily someone has made an add-on with the descriptive but not exactly ‘roll-off-the-tongue’ name “Change quote and reply format” to fix this problem. Now the quote header is much more useful:

—- Original message —–
From: sender@provider.com
To: recipient@provider.com
Subject: something
Date: 01/01/2005

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be listed at Mozilla’s plugin site, so I only stumbled on it after googling a bit and reading a few forum pages.  The home page (linked above) isn’t very well designed, but there’s a more user-friendly description of the plugin at The Extensions Mirror.

Background

As I mentioned in previous posts, I’ve just upgraded to Vista. Having investigated a couple of ways to export my Thunderbird Mail (in mbox format) to the new Windows Mail or Outlook I came to the conclusion it wasn’t possible to do so and retain my folder structure, as the mbox2eml program, for example, seemed to just create all my messages in one folder.

When I read in PC Pro magazine that Thunderbird 2.0 had been released (Thunderbird 1.5 for some reason didn’t think it important to let me know), I decided to give it a go instead. Sure enough I just copied and pasted my mailbox into the new profile it created on Vista (for some reason in the “Roaming” settings directory rather than the ‘this computer’ directory) and I was up and running in seconds.

Author: nerd.

An experienced IT professional, I used to run a number of small websites and spend a lot of time tinkering with my sites or my PC - back when I had free time.

3 thoughts on “nerd. links – Make Thunderbird Quote Headers in Replies”

  1. I have the reverse problem. I’m forwarding email and people are complaining about the excessive information contained in the forwarded messages headers.
    It has every field and every X-Header quoted in the forwarded message and it’s mostly just spoor. I’d like to be able to control how much of the header is contained in the quoted message and cut it down to a reasonable amount.

  2. This was a really very very good submit. In theory I’d like to create like this also – getting time and actual effort to make a fantastic piece of writing… but what can I say… I procrastinate alot and by no means seem to obtain some thing done.

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