Reply - how to reply to the whole message

[WanaGo]

Hello,

I am new to Thunderbird, I have come from Outlook.

I am trying to reply to a message which I have received from a customer when I was using outlook. We have been back and forth a number of times, so the email is quite long. When I reply to the message, it seems to cut off all the replies except for the last one. I don't want this, I want the full email history to stay and I just add my reply to the top, just like a normal email, not doing this 'quote' stuff which seems to be happening.

How do I go about doing this?

Thunderbird 31.3.0

Many thanks
WanaGo

[WanaGo]

This happens when I reply or reply to all, same result.

I have the 'automatically quote the original message when replying' option ticked, but it only seems to add on the very last reply, not the whole email trail.
I am very confused, I cant find any option anywhere to change this. I just want to reply, not quote only the last email reply.
If I remove this option, then when I click reply all history is gone, its like starting a blank email.

Please can someone assist.

Regards
WanaGo

[rhhartman]

Never seen this before; you either get the full history or nothing at all.

One exception I've noticed (and which is probably a bug):
When you select text from a received email and copy that to the clipboard, then hit 'Reply', the new email will only contain the clipboard text instead of the thread history. This can be quite annoying. But this does not seem related to your issue.

The only difference between Reply and Reply All is that all addressees will receive your reply, instead of only the sender. So behavior should be the same on all other aspects.

What have you defined under 'Composition and Adressing'? Most used, but not default, and not necessarily recommended, settings are:
- Compose in HTML
- Automatically quote - start reply above the quote - place signature below reply (above the quote)
- Include sig for replies

Hope this helps.

[Adrian Bell]

Thunderbird cuts off all text below, and including, the signature separator "-- " (dash, dash, space). I don't know if it is possible to change this behaviour.

Is it your signature that is causing this? If so, make sure that in "Account Settings... > Copmposition & Addressing" you choose to place your signature below the quote.

If it is someone else's, this, admittedly old thread, suggests that "you can force Thunderbird to include all of the text in your reply by highlighting the full text of the email (even past the -- delimiter) before hitting reply".
viewtopic.php?f=39&t=1967681

Someone else here may have a more up to date solution for you?

[WanaGo]

What have you defined under 'Composition and Addressing'? Most used, but not default, and not necessarily recommended, settings are:
- Compose in HTML
- Automatically quote - start reply above the quote - place signature below reply (above the quote)
- Include sig for replies

That is correct, that is what I have now.

Yeah I find the behaviour of Thunderbird very strange indeed, and I cant understand why the current behaviour would be wanted by anyone to be honest. An email is an email, its not a forum post - in my opinion, so the full history should be in the email as it is all relevant to that email message.

Selecting all of the message before hitting reply is working, but I find it bizarre that I would even have to do this in the first place. It seems completely backwards to me, coming from Outlook.

Anyway, thank you for the replies.

Regards
WanaGo

[DanRaisch]

What you're experiencing is not normal functionality of Thunderbird. As rhhartman said above, selecting text in the message being replied to before clicking on "Reply" or "Reply all" will cause Thunderbird to quote only the selected text. (It's not necessary to copy the text to the clipboard, only to select it.) If no text is selected in the message being replied to, Thunderbird will normally quote all of the contents of the received message. It may be, as Adrian Bell noted, that Thunderbird is responding to a signature delimiter located somewhere in the message and quoting based on that.

[WanaGo]

Thanks - I understand.

Is there a way to make Thunderbird disable anything to do with quotes and when you click reply it replies to everything in the email, regardless of what is selected or not?

I just want to be able to click reply and it puts my new message at the top, and everything else that was in the email is below it. I don't want it trimming or quoting anything, I just want to reply to the message as it is.

Regards

[DanRaisch]

As long as you don't highlight anything in the message you are replying to, Thunderbird should act just as you have described. That's the way it works here. Since the original message you are having this problem with was composed in Outlook, there is the risk that some MS proprietary code is in there, causing problems.

[WanaGo]

But wont that be the case in a lot of situations as I have no control over what applications other people use. If I am using thunderbird and they are using outlook, then these will still be present in the email body and potentially cause issues wont they?

If that is the case, wouldn't it be valid to have some way to disable thunderbird from reacting from these delimiters etc completely, and just have it reply to everything regardless of any code or delimiters found?

Regards
WanaGo

[Diane Vigil]

[Ignore, as this doesn't apply to the OP's situation.]

I've had this happen on occasion with Outlook emails (the disappearing text upon replying), but normally it does not. That is, normally with emails received from an Outlook user, all text and responses is there upon replying.

For problem emails, you *might* try copying all the text into a new email. Send it to yourself to see what happens. If it works (all text is there), then just do that for that particular email.

[rhhartman]

I think what Dan refers to is this, from your original post:

I am trying to reply to a message which I have received from a customer when I was using outlook.

Somehow you migrated this message into Thunderbird and now have an issue replying. That might be caused by proprietary MS-formatting.

When you normally receive a message directly into Thunderbird, the sender's client does not affect Thunderbird's behavior, although sometimes you'll see formatting issues, affecting fonts and accented characters.

The way you want Thunderbird to behave is how it behaves normally. I've implemented Thunderbird many times, on different platforms, and never encountered the behavior you describe. So it must be something unique to your specific situation, and may be caused by the way you migrated your Outlook emails to Thunderbird.

[WanaGo]

Hello,

I didn't migrate my emails form Outlook into Thunderbird as such. I use IMAP based email, an simply had been discussing with a customer using Outlook a few weeks ago, then I transitioned over to Thunderbird and set up the accounts etc and it pulled the emails off the server. I then get an email from the customer again, this time it arrives into thunderbird, and I go to reply, and it cuts everything off below their last message.
I didn't do some export/import of emails if that is what you were thinking.

Selecting All and then clicking reply, solves the issue.
I am just trying to figure out why this happens and why this type of behaviour is even happening and how it can be disabled so it doesn't happen.

Even if Thunderbird is just getting tripped up from some weird formatting or escape characters etc from the email body, what I am trying to determine is how to shut it off so thunderbird does not react to this type of thing, ever. All I want is for a reply to simply reply to the whole message, every time. I don't want these escape characters or special things in the body of the email which Thunderbird then attempts to look for and do magical things, I want to disable all that. Is it possible?

I hope that makes more sense.
I am aware of how to work around it, I just want to find out how to disable it so it never happens.

This is the only email I have seen so far that has done this, that I have immediately noticed anyway.

Regards
WanaGo

[piecevcake]

I am getting the same problem, in Thunderbird 52.9.1 (has it been fixed since??)

The quoted messages are showing in my sent copy in Thunderbird. They are not cut off by Thunderbird.

The quoted messages also show on messages opened on iPhones.

Conclusion: They are cut off only when opened in M$ Outlook. When the complete message is forwarded from iPhone to Outlook they are also missing.

When the Outlook recipients reply to the message, it arrives back in Thunderbird still cut off. So it is not a view issue, Outlook finds the beginning of the body of the first quoted message sent from Thunderbird, and chops it. The header lines of the first quoted message are the only part left. It happens in both reply and forwarding. (Even when the quoted message has been edited with replies.)

It does not happen for most outlook users. So it is either a setting, or a bug in some versions.
==============
One outlook user posted this at https://www.sevenforums.com/microsoft-o ... t-off.html:

I sorted it.

There's a setting called something like "Remove unnecessary HTML code" , which I unchecked and it all worked.

It was a Bugzilla report that pastes as HTML (and it was quite big) that was getting corrupted by this setting.

We use Exchange 2007 and HTML format.

==============
I don't have outlook so I can't test this - but would be great if someone could post more precise instructions!

In the meantime thanks for the select all workaround, I'll try that.

[DanRaisch]

You've replied to a thread that died out 5 years ago and you're using a version of Thunderbird that was made obsolete 2 years ago. In addition, the issue actually seems to be found in Outlook rather than Thunderbird so Thunderbird Support doesn't seem to be the correct location for it. This thread is being locked due to the age of the original posts and the apparent source of the issue.