Remove email addresses before forwarding the email

For some email clients, when you forward an email, the text of the forwarded email appears in the body of the new message. This somewhat blurs the line between the new and the forwarded message, and replying to the original message can get cumbersome and confusing after the original email has been forwarded a few more times. In other words, the original email will get lost in the chain, or worse, it gets replicated every time it is forwarded.

Forwarding these messages as attachments however solves these problems nicely because the original message now acts like a baton in the relay foot race. No matter how many runners the baton goes through in the race, there is no confusion where the baton is. Encapsulating the original email as an attachment keeps the various people in the conversation from going off topic.

So that was a little back ground info on potential problems with forwarding an email. Now let’s talk about one side effect of making the forwarded email an attachment — at least in Thunderbird.

When you use Thunderbird version 2 with its default configuration to forward an email, the program encapsulate the original email as an attachment. This causes a problem if you want to forward an email but you do not want the recipient of this email to see some or all of the email addresses to which the original email was sent. When Thunderbird sends the original email as a attachment, there is no option to remove these email addresses. However, if you tell Thunderbird to send the original email as “inline”, you have the option to completely or partially remove these email addresses.

Tools –> Options –> Composition. Under Forward Messages, choose Inline.

The above change is now part of the configuration of Thunderbird. However, let’s say you only want to do this address removal as a case by case basis. In other words, you still want Thunderbird to send the original email as an attachment in the forwarded email, but once in a while, you prefer to remove the addresses from the original emails before forwarding it. Open the message you want to forward. 
Select Message –> Forward As –> Inline from the menu. Remove the addresses as you wish.