Dear TeachUsTech’ers,
Sometimes you don’t want to forward an entire email—just the important part. Maybe you’re sharing a short note with a family member or only a few steps from a longer message. In this lesson, we’ll show you how to forward a Gmail email and then delete the extra text above and below the part you actually want to share.
We’ll use one of our Teach Us Tech newsletters as the example, but these steps work with almost any email in Gmail.
These newsletters are made to be printed and kept nearby, so feel free to mark them up and write your own notes in the margins. If you have a friend that would appreciate this but don’t know how to forward emails yet, you can view our very first newsletter here on “How to Forward an Email”.
Before you begin
You have a Gmail account and can sign in at mail.google.com.
You are using Gmail in a web browser on a computer (Chrome, Safari, Edge, etc.).
You already have an email in your inbox that you want to partially forward.
Follow these steps:
Step 1 – Find email you want to forward a part of
Open Gmail and look in your Inbox for the email that has the part you want to share. Click once on that email in the list to make sure you are in the right conversation.
Step 2 – Open the email you want to forward a part of
Gmail will show the email on the right. Scroll if you need to, so you can see the text you want to send. We’ll be forwarding a short paragraph from this newsletter as our example.
Step 3 – Start with forwarding the email
Near the top-right of the message, click the three vertical dots (the “More” button). In the menu that appears, click Forward. This tells Gmail you want to send this email on to someone else.
Step 4 – Add your friend’s email address
A new email window will appear with the original message copied into it. At the top, click in the To box and type your friend’s email address. You can also add a brief note above the forwarded text later if you’d like.
Step 5 – Delete extra text above the part you want
Below your new message, you’ll see the original email content. First, remove the extra header lines at the very top (the “From”, “Date”, “Subject”, and “To” lines). Use your mouse to click and drag over those lines so they turn highlighted, then press the Delete or Backspace key on your keyboard.
Step 6 – Delete the extra text below the snippet you want to forward
Next, scroll until you see the main body of the email. In our example, the paragraph inside the blue outline is the part we want to share. The numbered steps below it are extra. Click and drag over the text you do not want to send (the section inside the orange outline), then press Delete or Backspace again. You can repeat this as many times as you need until only the paragraph you want to share is left.
Step 7 – Check your snippet and send
Take a quick look at the email body. You should now see only the short section of text you meant to forward—nothing above it and nothing below it. When you’re happy with how it looks, click the Send button.
That’s it!
Forwarding just part of an email is handy when you want to keep things simple for the person receiving it. You stay in control of what they see, and they do not have to scroll through extra details they do not need.
If you found this guide helpful, you can subscribe to receive future Teach Us Tech newsletters by email at www.TeachUsTech.com.
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