How to workaround Gmail Print's unfaithful treatment of EML attachments?

Question

On a message having an .EML attachment, Gmail Print misleadingly includes the attachment's content in the main message body, falsely labelled as forwarded. Other attachments e.g. .TXT are unaffected.

With attachment .TXT

Print shows:

With attachment .EML

Print shows:

Anyone know a workaround in Gmail?

PS A workaround outside is to use a different client e.g. Fastmail, but this inadequately distinguished the attachment reference from body content, e.g. on:

shows:

PS This also occurs on non-EMLs as Content-Type: message/rfc822; Content-Disposition: inline;

Answer 1

misleadingly includes the attachment's content in the main message body, falsely labeled as forwarded. Other attachments e.g. .TXT are unaffected.

.eml files are emails, and likely why they are being handled differently with respect to printing.

Emails attached to another message are not "falsely labeled" as forwarded, they are forwarded emails. A mail client doesn't differentiate between a forwarded email that a user considers forwarded, and a forwarded email that a user does not consider forwarded.

Gmail is assuming users want the forwarded email printed along with the main message. This may not be what you prefer. Others may love it. Just one of the thousands of UX decisions made on users' behalf by Google for better or worse.

The EML file format is used by many mail clients including Novell GroupWise, Microsoft Outlook Express, Lotus notes, Windows Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Postbox.

It isn't surprising that GMAIL can interpret .eml attachments properly as forwarded messages and print them as part of the message. Probably a legacy feature to provide more support for varied mail systems. Would be worth running the same test with attachments from other formats (.msg, .emlx, .mbx, etc.).

The entire email that Gmail receives is not separate files, but one single encoded file that Gmail chooses how to interpret, render, and ultimately print. Gmail chooses to print previews of many image formats, but it could just as well print nothing at all but an icon (like pdfs), or the entire image.

See Wikipedia Email