getting rid of "show quoted text"

[Akincana Krishna das]

I forward a lot of emails, sometimes making slight changes.

Gmail likes to collapse the body of my email into a link "show quoted
text."

How do I get rid of that? For my purposes, thats almost never
useful. I want to be able to forward an entire email, attachments
included, without any recipient getting a collapsed email that they
have to follow a link to see.

Thank you.

[Diggi...@gmail.com]

This is not a technical answer. But unless jokes are the only thing
you forward, you're potentially creating an issue of ownership and
attribution, in two separate ways. The first is that by changing
anything, you've changed the nature of what was forwarded to you and
now words "belonging" to someone else are not what they actually
wrote. The second is that in a sense you are claiming ownership of
their words. There's almost always a question of mis-attribution of
someone's words when they appear online. While email is not the same
as a website,, you're nonetheless creating issue for other
participants and potential problems for yourself.

[Zack (Doc)]

The "Show quoted text" is only for your viewing.  It is done by GMail when displaying the message, not when storing and sending it.  Your recipients see the message in it's entirety (unless they too are using GMail, and it might collapse it, but that's not something you can control).

--

Alfred Lord Tennyson  - "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers."

[Ariel Telford]

Zack (Doc):

Some of my recipients ARE gmail users, which is why this issue
troubles me. Are you saying there is nothing I can do for these gmail
users? Isn't that a weakness in the gmail system?

And are you sure there is no other type of email account where this is
an issue?


DiggittMcL:

I work for a record label, and am promoting merchandise that we sell.
What I'm forwarding are promotional emails which I've written to a
variety of potential buyers. I change the emails slightly sometimes
to tailor what I say to individuals that I've had conversations with
on the phone.

This is all to say, there is never an issue of misrepresenting
someone, since the only person I'm representing is myself.

[Zack (Doc)]

You're misunderstanding me.  Perhaps this post from the official support group might help better:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=360b8f1d7dff2453&hl=en

Basically, it only shows up if the conversation you're viewing already has that text (in nearly/exactly the same form).  When the messages are sent/stored, they are whole.  If the person you're sending this to has never seen the conversation before, regardless of the system they're using, they'll see the whole message, which looks like when you've clicked the "show quoted text".  If they have already seen this, and it's part of the same conversation, and they're using GMail, it will be collapsed into the "show quoted text", but only if you haven't altered it.  If you're altered it, then it won't be collapsed.

--

Joss Whedon, Zack Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, and Jed Whedon  - "Sometimes people are layered like that. There's something totally different underneath than ...

[Andy]

Zack (Doc) is mostly correct, based on my experience. But perhaps not
entirely.

The message you send always has the complete text, both what you forwarded
and what you added.

The "show quoted text" is added by Gmail when the message is received by a
Gmail user who is using Gmail's online interface. The "show quoted text" is
not a link within the message itself; it is being added by Gmail in their
user interface that they (or you) are using to view a message.

It does appear that Gmail does that only if it sees that text already in the
same conversation received by that person.

On the other hand, some email readers (and this potentially could include
other online email web interfaces) recognize quoted text, usually by the ">"
or the equivalent of a "|" at the far left of each line, and may do things
with that quoted text ... including changing its color or font, or
potentially substituting a "show quoted text" link in its place (though I
don't know if I've ever seen that). That is entirely up to the individual
email program. So yes there is a possibility of this happening in another
email program or system too.

You could get around that, by not having the ">" or "|" at the start of each
line. You might need to cut-and-paste the text from the original emails
into yours, rather than just forwarding it, so that there are no visual cues
that that portion of the text was in fact forwarded.

Andy