CyberNotes: Start Your Reply Before The Quoted Message In Thunderbird

Tutorial Thursday

Mozilla Thunderbird makes keeping up on my email a piece of cake. I don’t use it for my personal emails because I don’t get enough of those but it comes in handy for the emails we receive at CyberNet. One thing that always bothered me was that, by default, when you reply to a message it will put the quoted message at the very top. I know that is the professional formatting but I like having my reply at the top, since that will probably be the first thing that the person wants to see anyways.

It took a little hunting but I finally found the option to customize where the quoted message and signature are placed. Here is how you configure them:

1. Open the Tools menu and select Account Settings.
2. Find the default account that you send your messages with. Within that account select the option Composition and Addressing.
3. On the right side of the screen you should see the Composition options. Change them to whatever you would like but this is what I chose:
   
4. After I had saved those settings I went and tested to make sure it worked properly. Just find an existing email and hit the Reply button. This is now how my emails are organized:
   
   I drew boxes around the message that I started to type, my signature, and then the quoted message from the original email I received. As you can see it has positioned them exactly how I want.

This setting wasn’t that hard to change it just took me a little while to find it. For about a week I was copying and pasting my signature up to the top before I realized that there had to be an easier way to do this. I should have thought about it sooner but it’s the obvious things that I never think about.