Forward Hotmail email messages (inline or attached)
HotmailUniversity
There are three ways to send an email from Hotmail: compose a new message, reply or reply to all, and plain old forwarding. This tutorial will explain how to manually forward Hotmail messages inline and as attachments. An inline forward shows the content of the forwarded message inside the body of the new message; when you forward an email "as attachment", it will show as an email file attachment to the recipient: this is a less user friendly approach, for several reasons we'll discuss below, but is the best option if you want to forward multiple emails at the same time.
Tip: this tutorial explains how to manually forward emails to another sender ("redirecting a copy of the message"), not to be confused with the Hotmail Mail Forwarding feature, which automatically sends messages you receive to another email account.
Forward an email from one sender to another recipient
First, sign in to Hotmail if needed - we are assuming that you use Hotmail from a web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox; the next section in this tutorial will cover checking Hotmail from a email program like Windows Live Mail.
- Go to the email folder that contains the message you want to forward, and open it with a click - you'll now be looking at the content of the message in question (a good way to double-check that you are about to forward the correct message!)
- Then, click on the "Forward" button / link in the toolbar, as shown below:
(As visible from the tooltip pictured above, you can also use the "Ctrl+Shift+F" keyboard shortcut to forward the selected message from Hotmail.) - As soon as you do, Hotmail will redirect you to the email editor (the "compose window"), pre-filled with the title / subject line from the original email, and prefixed with "
FW:" to designate to the recipients that it is an email forward, and containing in the body the text of the original message.
- If the original message contains file attachments, as is the case above, you can remove them by clicking on the "x" next to the file icon: if the attachment is not necessary, removing it will avoid needlessly increasing the size of your email forward (takes longer to download and can cause problems with recipients whose mail provider/organization enforces strict limits on maximum inbox size).
- Optionally type some text where the cursor blinks: if the title of the message is obvious, you can skip that or simply say something like "See below" - otherwise, it is courteous to take the time to explain why you saw fit to forward that particular message: everyone receives more emails than they have free time!
Click on the "Send" button, and your email forward is on its way!
Forwarding multiple emails / forwarding messages as attachments
Forwarding emails as described earlier implies that you only forward a single email at a time: but what if you want to forward a batch of emails to one or more recipients? You can do that, but you can't currently do it from Hotmail inside a web browser. (If you select multiple messages, right-click on one of them, and choose "Forward", Hotmail will instruct you to "Please select just one item and then try again".)
While explaining how to setup your Hotmail account in an email program is beyond the scope of this tutorial, here's how you proceed from the email client of your choice (Outlook, Windows Live Mail, etc.), follow these simple steps:
- First, navigate to the folder containing the emails you want to forward.
- Then, hold down the control key on your keyboard ("Ctrl"), and click on one message after the other while keeping the Ctrl pressed down.
- Once all emails are selected, press Ctrl+F on your keyboard (or click the "Forward" button if you see one), and pick one or more recipients
FYI: The web browser version of Hotmail uses "Ctrl+Shift+F" because the "Ctrl+F" keyboard shortcut is already taken by the "Find text in web page" functionality.
We'll update this tutorial as soon as we learn that the Windows Live team has added support for forwarding multiple emails or emails as attachments from the web browser version of Hotmail. Stay tuned!