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Thunderbird replies & forwarding

For ages I've grappled with the fact that when replying to emails using Thunderbird you don't get the original email's details regarding sent timestamp. In Thunderbird there seems to be a "Outlook does it so we won't" attitude, but this is one that is really useful for auditing, to track threads of emails (especially when about to submit formal complaints to governing bodies).

And then, with a quick look on the old tinternet, I came across the answer.

The standard reply header in Thunderbird is

Sender wote:

This is of no use to beast nor man. So, in a file that doesn't exist by default, buried in your profile, you can add:

// Help found at http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/edit#user // Change the reply header // 0 - No Reply-Text // 1 - "[Author] wrote:" // 2 - "On [date] [author] wrote:" // 3 - User-defined reply header. Use the prefs below in conjunction with this: user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_type", 3);

// If you set 3 for the pref above then you may set the following prefs.
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote", "%s said the following");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_ondate", "on %s");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_separator", " ");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_colon", ":");
// The end result will be [authorwrote][separator][ondate][colon]

This will give you a header in your reply such as:

Sender said the following on 12/08/2008 21:33:

Now, isn't that more helpful? Apart from you need to know where user.js lives, even though it doesn't exist by default so you can't just search for it. Want the full picture? Look here.

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