Recently I tried to print multiple messages in Mozilla Thunderbird 6. Thunderbird would not allow me to select several and click print and then get every messages full contents, instead I got a summary of the emails containing the first two-three lines.

The reason I want to do this is not to waste paper, but to send them to PDFCreator where I can use the combine function and output one large PDF for archiving.

Anyway, back to the problem in hand it just doesn’t work in Thunderbird 6. Fortunately there is a work around:

In thunderbird config editor (Tools | options | advanced | general) , to set mail.operate_on_msgs_in_collapsed_threads = false

When you get there, you will encounter a long list of scary looking attributes for your Thunderbird set up. Press on, dauntless! This is not brain surgery. Scroll down until you find mail.operate_on_msgs_in_collapsed_threads=true, highlight it and click on it. It should look exactly the same but now =false. Now get out of that area and turn off Thunderbird and turn it back on again and your individual messages should print out when you highlight them as a group and you should not get the summary printing out.

All done and fixed (thought I’d post it here for my reference and anybody else’s that encounters this problem!).