Discussion on:

Five tips for cleaning up email messages before you forward them

To be honest I often want recipients to know that it is an obviously forwarded message and that content was not created by myself.

Personally, I'm not one to forward messages unless I need to and when I am forwarding it is usually as reference. When this happens I want the > character to be there and generally the FW: in the subject line BUT I have always removed the headers unless it is a common contact information.

Both re-formatting and leaving the message format has it's own benefits that I do understand but, it does depend on who you're sending the message to and the context of the message.

My 2 cents for the day... thanks for the tips!

I'm suggesting the clean up options because forwarded content is often difficult to read. It's not always the case of course.

It represents much of what I do.

As h8... says, I like the FW:, (or RE:), but only one. If as Susan suggests you are in a case where there are more than one, then I will cleanup the "extra" ones.

For long discussions that have been forwarded many times I will often trim the oldest parts that are not relevant to the current points being discussed.

I agree with jbenton, when forwarding to more than one person I always use BCC if they are not all part of the same project. I would make that item number 6 in the list.

I sometimes find information converted to tables when forwarding, and reforwarding creates another set of nested tables etc etc. I always convert tables to text before resending so the information is presented cleanly.

I often use this field to avoid sending everyone's contact information in the first place (and avoid them getting replies only intended for me when someone carelessly uses reply to all)
Similar to the '>' problem, try not to indent original text multiple times; by the fifth iteration it's almost off the screen

"If youre re-forwarding a message, the body probably contains numerous > characters. Many clients use this character to indicate forwarded text."

I can't think of a single email client that uses the greater-than symbol specifically to indicated forwarded text. When limited to plain ASCII text, most clients do default to using the greater-than symbol to mark the beginning of QUOTED material in replies -- and some will do so in forwarded messages.

However, the use of plain (ASCII) text in email is about as common as confirmed extraterrestrial arrivals on the White House Lawn. The only time you would be likely to see significant layers of greater-than symbols from mutiple forwarding would be if an email was forwarded repeatedly entirely within some business or government agency where the IT department enforces a Plain-Text-Only configuration for the company email client.

IF it were occasionally necessary to remove multiple layers of greater-than symbols, it would be more appropriate to take the trivial extra time needed to reduce the multiple layers down to a single greater-than symbol at the beginning of each quoted line. This can be readily accomplished using the replace function as suggested but set the Find What to >> and the Replace With to > then repeat the replace command (no need to re-do the Find What or Replace With) until the text has only a single > character at the start of each quoted line.

While no mail client uses the > symbol nearly all the webmail programs do and there millions of people who use webmail daily on computers that are not their regular machine

I have a lot of users ask if there is a way to get rid of the blue vertical lines that outlook places to the left of a forwarded message? Have not seen a solution to this is posted anywhere.

The simplest way to really get this straightened out seems to be to copy the desired text into a word processing program - even wordpad. Edit the text from there, then paste the text back into A COMPLETELY NEW MESSAGE. Then add your own subject line and BCC contacts and continue on.

These are an indication of quoted text. If you have received something that was pasted in as a quote in some earlier forwarding of the message OR if the message originator copied something from some source and then pasted it into the email message as a quote OR the original source is simply forwarded, it will appear as quoted text, hence the vertical line alongside. This is not unique to Outlook. It's a feature of many, if not all, email programs.

When I forward a message, I "copy" the main body and click on "Forward". I then "paste" the copy above the "original" message and delete the original. Granted, the headers are still intact, but at least the message content has been made readable - occasionally, I even need to clean that up as some mail programs insert "=" at the end of some lines or some other such crud. When forwarding non-important stuff (e.g., jokes, cartoons, etc.), I also bcc my copy list and send to either myself or "undisclosed_recipient" and delete the rejection to "u-r". This at least keeps the "cc" list a little shorter (and protects the other receivers from any prying eyes that happen to be looking when the e-mail is opened - again the headers remain). If I had thought of it way, way back then, I would have requested an actual e-mail address of undisclosed_recipient (or some other bogus address) just for forwarding jokes, etc. and forwarded those type of e-mails to that address. Actually, I do everything mentioned in the article.