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.
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8 comments so far… Jump into the discussion and tell us what you think.
use about:config plugin of
Preferences->advanced->config editor
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.
Glad my post helped you Peter! I agree, Thunderbird should have made this much easier to configure. Perhaps in the next rev.
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?
Is there a way to add new lines as in
Dear [Author],
->Cursor goes here etc…
/n doesn’t work. :-(
How to include To and CC in reply header. I am always getting this in Outlook.
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).
Great answer Vic, thanks for sharing the knowledge!