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Everytime someone sends a mail to my company's support email address, it reaches my boss. He then forwards the mails to whoever of us he thinks could be helpful, usually with a message like "Could you check this and follow up with him?".

However, he always forwards me the emails inline, not as an attachment, which makes it impossible for me to reply; I can only compose a new mail to the original sender.

I've asked him to sent the forwarded emails as attachments instead, but there seems to be no obvious way to do that in the GMail web client he's using. However, the comment on this question seems to suggest that it's possible (and I would imagine so, as it's a fairly standard email function).

So, how can he enable forwarding as an attachment in the Google webmail interface?

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  • The short answer is you can't, not without messing around saving the html to a file. The only other way would be to use a Desktop Client to access GMail.
    – codingbadger
    Commented Jun 21, 2011 at 9:54
  • What does forwarding as attachment accomplish that forwarding inline doesn't do? I've never received an email as attachment.
    – badp
    Commented Jun 21, 2011 at 10:14
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    @badp balpha doesn't like inefficiency, he is German!
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Jun 21, 2011 at 10:18
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    @badp: If Jeff forwards me the email as an attachment, I can just open that and click reply, which pre-populates the composed mail with the sender's address, the quoted content, etc.
    – balpha ♦
    Commented Jun 21, 2011 at 10:29
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    Not a direct answer but why not create a common support email address (something like [email protected] and have everyone have access to it to start with? (Will help your "boss" to take a vacation) You might also want to look at some ticket/incident management system for the long run...
    – Nivas
    Commented Jun 21, 2011 at 12:06

2 Answers 2

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After some googling this is the best answer I can give you

Click on "Options" then click on "Show original":

The view source of the new window and then save that to a file that you can then attach

readnotify send as attachement (gmail)

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For those who are not yet convinced, take it from another power user: attaching email messages and forwarding as attachment are very useful and powerful functions. Perhaps you just haven't seen the use-case for it yet.

I tried the advice given in this thread and it totally didn't work. At least, when I forwarded the message as explained here to my power-user email service provider, all I got in their (very advanced) web client (which has support for attached messages) was a message with a normal file attachment on it, no more useful than if it were a .txt or .jpg or something.

It really looks to me that this is simply impossible in Gmail, not merely difficult.

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