Is there a way to easily open email that's been forwarded multiple times as attachments?

It is annoying. I get these types of emails all the time (many of which make their way to my humor site Forwarded Funnies).

I can explain why it happens. I can even point out something that some of your senders might be able to do.

But so far, I’ve not been able to figure out a way to avoid it if you’re the recipient of these messages.

When email is forwarded, the mail program doing the forwarding has a couple of options:

• The mail program can place the forwarded message in the body of the new message. Typically it does so by extracting a couple of the “interesting” email headers like “From:”, “To:”, the date and subject, and placing those first, and then following up with the actual body of the original mail. There are two problems with this approach: the original email headers are lost (things like the routing headers that you don’t normally see anyway), and the message may be reformatted from plain text to HTML or vice versa. In other words, the forwarded message isn’t exactly like the original. It may have been changed in some presumably inconsequential ways.
• The mail program can take the original message in its entirety and unchanged, and wrap it up in an attachment. When the recipient opens that attachment they see the original message exactly as it was when forwarded. (In practice I don’t expect that this is always exactly true because of the ways different mail programs behave, but for our purposes it’s true enough.)The problem, as you’ve seen, is that it’s an attachment which takes more work to open. And a series of forwards in this mode compounds that problem.

Now, sometimes the sender can control this. In Thunderbird, for example, there’s an obscure setting that allows you to specify whether forwarded messages should be in-line or as attachments. (In the Config Editor, set mail.forward_message_mode to 0 to send as an attachment – apparently the default – or set to 2 to forward as an inline message.)

Other mailers don’t have this setting, and either simply do one or the other, or perhaps decide based on some characteristics of the mail being forwarded. Perhaps message of the same format (rich text versus plain text) are forwarded in line, while a plain text message forwarded as HTML, or vice versa, is forwarded as an attachment. Or perhaps messages with attachments are, themselves, forwarded as attachments.

Two important take-aways from all that:

1. it’s confusing and inconsistent
2. it’s the sender that decides what happens

Which, ultimately, means that when you and I receive a message that’s a forwarded attachment in a forwarded attachment in a forwarded attachment – we’re out of luck. I know of no way to shortcut unwrapping all the attachments to get to the one you really want, short of doing it manually. I’ve certainly not encountered a mail program that recognizes or helps this situation.

Perhaps readers will have some other ideas.