Forwarding An Email As An Attachment

Forwarding an email as an attachment is easy

Forwarding an email as an attachment is like sending a sealed envelope within another envelope. It preserves the original message’s integrity, including all headers and metadata. This is crucial when diagnosing delivery issues or reporting suspicious emails. Different email clients have various methods for forwarding emails as attachments. Below are step-by-step instructions for the most popular email platforms.

Outlook 2010–2019, Outlook for Microsoft 365

Quite possibly the easiest software to forward an email as an attachment!

  1. Open Outlook and select or open the email you wish to forward
  2. On your keyboard, hold Ctrl and Alt, then hit F
  3. This will create a new email with the selected email as an attachment

If this doesn’t work, you’re probably using the “New” Outlook which has been rolling out in 2025.

“New” Outlook & Outlook Webmail

There’s a couple more steps involved with this, and works on both the New Outlook and Outlook via your web browser.

  1. Open Outlook and select or open the email you wish to forward
  2. In the menu bar (or ribbon as Microsoft call it), you’ll see a dropdown arrow underneath “Forward”
  3. Click that down arrow and choose “Forward as attachment”
  4. This will create a new email with the selected email as an attachment

Gmail or Google Workspace

Gmail via the browser is nice and simple.

  1. Open Gmail and right-click the email
  2. From the dropdown menu, choose “Forward as attachment”
  3. This will create a new email with the selected email as an attachment