Reply Header in Thunderbird

Sarah Sweeney posted a tip to the eVolt list which I have found very helpful. One of the few annoyances I have had with Mozilla Thunderbird, my e-mail client of choice, is the fact that it doesn’t include the date of the original message when replying. So, when I replied to people, it would place the text “John Doe wrote:” before their message instead of “John Doe wrote on July 28, 2004:”. Sarah’s tip describes how to easily modify that reply header to list whatever you so desire, all you need to do is add the following code to your user.js:


// 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 conjuction
// 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 wrote");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_separator", " ");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_ondate", "on %s");
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_colon", ":");
// The end result will be [authorwrote][separator][ondate][colon]

Make sure that you are not running Thunderbird while making these changes. One note, if you don’t have a user.js file in your profile folder, create one as a blank text file and place this code in it.

8 comments so far… Jump into the discussion and tell us what you think.

  1. Make it easy says:

    use about:config plugin of
    Preferences->advanced->config editor

  2. Peter says:

    Amazing! I was looking for this for ages. All this without an extension! However, I don’t know why is it not possible to adjust this in Thunderbird menus.

  3. Alex says:

    Glad my post helped you Peter! I agree, Thunderbird should have made this much easier to configure. Perhaps in the next rev.

  4. wayne says:

    I’d like it to have the same header you get when forwarding an email. That’s the standard in every other mail program I’ve used; I believe it’s also the method used in earlier forms of Thunderbird mail (pre-thunderbird).

    Any way to do that?

  5. Ome Ko says:

    Is there a way to add new lines as in
    Dear [Author],

    ->Cursor goes here etc…

    /n doesn’t work. :-(

  6. Siva says:

    How to include To and CC in reply header. I am always getting this in Outlook.

  7. Vic says:

    Yes, inserting new lines is easy. You need to use backslash, i.e. \n not /n. For example, the following:

    user_pref(“mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote”, “—– Original Message —–\nFrom: %s”);
    user_pref(“mailnews.reply_header_ondate”, “Sent: %s”);
    user_pref(“mailnews.reply_header_separator”, “\n”);
    user_pref(“mailnews.reply_header_colon”, “”);

    generates this reply header:

    —– Original Message —–
    From: J. Random Person
    Sent: 1/7/2010 6:34 PM

    You can embed as much text and as many newlines as you want (within some limit I’m sure).

  8. Alex says:

    Great answer Vic, thanks for sharing the knowledge!

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