WTF: You Can’t Edit Emails Before Forwarding Them On WP7
So I received a business email that had a bunch of choice words in it but there was still a portion of it that I needed to send to another party (who shouldn’t know exactly what we thought of them). So I can’t copy and paste the relevant portion so I figured I’d just hit forward then remove the parts of the text that shouldn’t be there. And that’s when I realized that you can’t edit the body of an email before forwarding or replying to it. This is true on Blackberry’s and has never made sense to me and I can’t justify why this would be a feature on any smartphone. Obviously on your desktop you can change the email chain before circulating it, but on your Windows Phone all you can do is grab a pen and paper, write down what you need to send and then retype it in. Very efficient…
And I remind you, I am a Windows Phone fan. Little things like this just irk the hell out of me.
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If I recall, the work-around is to do a reply and change the recipients to the people you want to forward the message on to. I don’t know that for certain since I haven’t forwarded an email in a decade.
You are correct about this being and issue on the BlackBerry but there is an app on BlackBerry called Forward, Reply, and Edit. Hopefully with copy and paste they will let you select text in the lower portion of the message.
I totally feel your pain on this it drove me CRAZY on my BlackBerry. Not that is matters much but native Android GMail client has the same limitation.
A better idea is to tell the dumbass who wrote the original email to never write anything in an email that they wouldn’t want forwarded to the people/businesses that they are discussing in the email. That’s taught in Emailing 101.
Apparently you’ve never been burned by a poorly edited forward. All forwards should be read-only or have non-removable “[your name here]”. Sounds more like a copy and paste issue.
or what FarTed said
You could definitely edit an email before forwarding on WM 6.x. I did that many times. This is a step back.
I apprecaite MS protecting me frommyself, but I prefer to make the choice if I want to edit an email and forward it…if I screw up it’s on me, not MS. But by not having the option I can’t diligently edit and forward an email. It’s not a favor to me…
And yes, it was available on 6.x…
On a side note, why even mention “it was on (WM) 6.x” anymore? What rewrites have all functionality in version 1.0? Maybe that’s just the developer in me that naturally responds with “that won’t make it in the initial version”.
I don’t this till now…. this is a dumb thing from Microsoft…
FYI…you can position the cursor in the parts of the letter you want to redact, and hit the delete button. That’s as good as it gets until MS does the copy/paste update.
@MEG: regardless of if I forward or reply, my curson will not go below the signature line of an email.
I assumed this would be solved with upcoming copy and paste. Gmail had this issue during Beta and while beyond.
I’ve noticed this for a while, because when forwarding an email and needing to reference something in the original message or one way down the chain, it’s instinctive to just arrow down (when using the slide out qwerty on my quantum). The cursor will stop at the bottom of my signature, then I have to reach up and slide with my finger to see anything below that.
Going a little off-topic, I don’t think there is any way in WP7 to “search the server,” meaning search from any email on the Exchange server, including all those older than the last two weeks (or whatever time period you have set to sync with the phone). This was possible in 6.5, and I thought a great reason for going with Windows Phone, you know, Microsoft playing nice with other MS systems. I also don’t think it is possible to set your Out-of-Office autoreply from the phone, which also was a nice feature of 6.5.
Kind of makes WP7 less of a business device. Hopefully that changes soon with this update…
@KCMatt: you definitely cannot search the server for emails. That’s also pissed me off but on WM 6.5 I always found that a luxury item for some reason:) It felt like magic for some reason and while I liked having it the few times I needed it, I didn’t do that as much as I edit emails and forward them.