{"id":128,"date":"2008-02-29T01:54:59","date_gmt":"2008-02-29T06:54:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2008\/tricky-little-issue-in-gmail-how-do-you-find-the-original-sender-of-a-forward\/"},"modified":"2008-02-29T01:54:59","modified_gmt":"2008-02-29T06:54:59","slug":"tricky-little-issue-in-gmail-how-do-you-find-the-original-sender-of-a-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2008\/tricky-little-issue-in-gmail-how-do-you-find-the-original-sender-of-a-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"Tricky little issue in Gmail – how do you find the original sender of a forward?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSCN9755\"<\/a> I ran across a confusing issue in Gmail and I’d like to share what I did to resolve it.\u00a0 It seems that Gmail won’t show you the original sender of a forwarded email by default in many cases.\u00a0 Here’s how I found the issue and what I did to correct it.<\/p>\n

My wife and I have a shared blog that automatically sends out updates to subscribers via Feedburner<\/a>.\u00a0 Feedburner is a great service if you have a blog, and you can use it to subscribe to my feed<\/a> and get updates when I write on this blog as well.<\/p>\n

When friends and family reply to an email from Feedburner, it goes to my email address and I need to forward it to my wife so she can read it too.\u00a0 I use Mozilla Thunderbird<\/a> as my email client so it’s easy to set up a filter to do it automatically (look under Tools –> Message Filters).\u00a0 But when the forwarded email showed up in my wife’s Gmail inbox, it showed only me as the sender – with no mention of the original sender, so she couldn’t tell who was replying to our blog.<\/p>\n

Gmail does let you see the original full text of the message – there’s a little down arrow next to Reply with a menu that includes “show original.”\u00a0 Email headers are hardly user-friendly, though, so that’s not a very good solution.<\/p>\n

It turns out that Gmail shows the name of the forwarder, not the name of the original sender, on forwards that are sent as an attachment.\u00a0 If the forward was sent inline it’s easy to see the original sender in the body of the mail.\u00a0 By default, Thunderbird sends forwards as attachments and I think Outlook has a similar default… in any event this is pretty common behavior.<\/p>\n

To fix it from my end I went in Thunderbird, to Tools-> Options and selected the Composition icon.\u00a0 Under the General tab, I changed Forward Messages to “Inline.”\u00a0 This does the trick.<\/p>\n

It would be nice, however, if Gmail made this a little more apparent in the user interface.\u00a0 Maybe saying something like “[forwarder name] forwarding from [original sender name].”\u00a0 Or it could be worked into the way conversations are viewed as threads.<\/p>\n

This may not be a very common issue, so it might not warrant a change to Gmail, but it’s a small enough usability tweak that it might be worth it.\u00a0 Hopefully you found this post helpful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I ran across a confusing issue in Gmail and I’d like to share what I did to resolve it.\u00a0 It seems that Gmail won’t show you the original sender of a forwarded email by default in many cases.\u00a0 Here’s how I found the issue and what I did to correct it. My wife and I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[225,230,228,224,88,227,226,231,229],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-email","tag-feedbuner","tag-forwards","tag-gmail","tag-how-to","tag-mozilla","tag-thunderbird","tag-troubleshooting","tag-user-interface-design-usability"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}