How to Forward an Email as an Attachment

In order to fully analyze the message that made it through our filters, we ask that you send the email exactly as you received it.  The intact headers and body must not be changed or modified in any way.  

Why do we need this?  It's important to have the original email sent to us as an attachment so we are able to run it through our filters and see all the scoring detail.  We can use the message to further train our filters or create new filtering rules.

Here's a widely used method of forwarding an email as an attachment:

1. Create a brand new email.

2. Move that window over so you can see your inbox listing of all your emails.

3. Drag the email (s) from the inbox listing over to the body of that new email you created in Step 1. This will put the full, intact message into the body of that new email as an attachment.

4. Send us that new email.

Have a different email client? Here are some instructions for other email software:

Microsoft/Office 365

Select the message you want to forward. Click on the three dots ... in the upper right corner>choose Other reply actions>Forward as attachment.

Send to abuse@mailroute.net

Macintosh Mail

Select one or more messages, and choose "Forward as Attachment" from the Message menu.

Outlook Express / Windows Mail

Right-click the message that you want to forward. In the menu that appears, click ‘Forward as Attachment’  at the top of the screen. Type in the email address and press ‘send’.

If you want to send multiple messages, you can also drag and drop messages onto the message window. You can also select multiple messages by holding the ‘Shift’ or ‘Ctrl’ keys when clicking, and then right-click and ‘Forward as Attachment’ as above.

Outlook 2011 for Mac

Click on “E-mail” to create a new email (or attach to any reply). Select the email you want to forward in the folder, and then drag it to the body area of the email. (An alternative is to select multiple emails as in Outlook 2003/XP below.)

Outlook 2010

Right-click the message, select ‘More Actions’ and then click the ‘Forward as Attachment’ option.

Outlook 2007

In Outlook 2007, ‘Forward as Attachment’ is available from the ‘Actions’ menu when one or more emails are selected.

Outlook 2003/XP

To forward multiple emails, select the messages (by holding the ‘Shift’ or ‘Ctrl’ keys when clicking). Then right-click and select ‘Forward items’. This automatically attaches the emails to a blank message – Outlook decides for itself whether to forward as an attachment depending on how many messages you are forwarding. Type in the email address you want to send to and press ‘send’.

Or, you can simply create a new email. You can then either drag and drop one or more messages into the new message (if after selecting the message you can’t see the new message window any more, drag it instead to the taskbar button for the new message and the window you want should come to the foreground); or from the menu, click the ‘Insert’ menu and then choose ‘Item’. In the top half of the window that opens, select the folder that contains the email you want to send, usually Inbox. Select the message you want to attach, and make sure that any ‘Insert As’ option is set to ‘Attachment’ before clicking ‘OK’. Type the destination email address and press ‘send’.

You can have Outlook always forward as attachment by going to ‘Tools’ > ‘Options’ > ‘Preferences’ > ‘E-mail Options’ > ‘When forwarding a message’, and selecting ‘Attach original message’ > ‘OK’.