Replies Append to Bottom in Thunderbird

philblog tells about how Mozilla Thunderbird has its default reply position at the bottom of the email.

It bugged me too. Here’s what he said about it:

Apparently replying at the bottom of an e-mail is not an acceptable practice because I seemed to have either confused, annoyed, irritated, or all three, several people by doing so. After a few e-mails and instant messages from people I figured I would check to find out if there was a way to change this. After a brief Google search I found the solution to setting the reply position on e-mails to the top instead of the bottom.
# In Thunderbird: Go to “Account Settings”
# Select “Composition & Addressing” for the account in question
# Check the checkbox in the Composition group that says “Automatically quote the original message when replying”.
# Once the combo box below is enabled select the option “Start my reply above the quote”

That did the trick. If you use Thunderbird, or are going to try it: do this!

65 Responses to “Replies Append to Bottom in Thunderbird”

  1. Raghav Rao says:

    Life Saver. Thunderbird should change this.

  2. Nick says:

    Thanks, this was bothering me as well as i’ve had to explain where my reply was to people. Above the quote should be the default. Poor UX decision by the mozilla thunderbird team.

  3. aiden says:

    thank you…this has annoyed me for ages!

  4. m3an93 says:

    not working for me when i send mail to groups through that group id appear in reply i want diffrenty email address any buddy help me plz?

  5. praiznhim says:

    Thank you, this was a lifesaver and timesaver! :)

  6. TruXter Tech says:

    Oh man this one frustrates me. It’s so dang simple so I forget every dang time.

  7. Gary Smith says:

    Thank you thank you!

  8. eddyed says:

    thanks a lot for this ! i just started using Thunderbird a few days ago and this was getting to me. I even sent out a test mail to myself to see if this is how it really appears. Problem solved. Thanks !

  9. Damien says:

    You are a legend my friend, that was annoying the hell out of me :-)

  10. John says:

    Hero!!
    Cannot for the life of me think why the Thunderbird Team would think anyone would want their reply in exactly reverse chronological order on a long thread!!?? My friends all thought I was just sending them back their own mails!!

  11. kris says:

    nice, thx for the tip! couldn´t find it in the general settings..

  12. Hank Meyer says:

    Thanks for this, was a pain before having to select the top of the message.

  13. Kelvin Koh says:

    open thunder bird
    1) click on Tools
    2) Account Setting
    3) go to “Composition & Addressing”
    4) at the “Automatically quote the original message when replying”, at the drop down box select “start my reply above the quite” and at the “place my signature” drop down box select “below my reply (above the quote)”
    5) click ok

    this should make your message above all old messages.

  14. Joze says:

    Thanks a million!

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