then use save as to save the emails as is. if you don't want to use EML, use HTML and read them in your browser, or even import it into word. I think 2003 had a HTML import option it was a while ago for me.

Hi Matt - You have the answer thank you. Because the main menu isn't normally visible in Thunderbird, I was unaware of the "save as" (and other) functions. But as you say I have found that I can "save as" into a .eml file, which really achieves my objective as I can easily copy those elsewhere. I have also found that there are .eml file converters, though I haven't looked into that.

However I am still curious why copy and paste doesn't work for Thunderbird or other e-mail programs. It's clearly something to do with the picture format in an e-mail and clipboard. Copy and past works fine from Word to an e-mail, and it works fine from one e-mail to another e-mail, but it won't copy the entire contents from an e-mail to Word, though it will copy text and individual images seperately!

But I have my solution and am very grateful for your help.

you are copying HTML to the system clipboard. HTML, that is web pages, is made up a text and links to images, not the actual images. so Copy and paste copies the text and the links, but the images do not make it because generally the links are to images embedded in the email (as a hidden attachment) so the link is useless with out the email.

Just a comment on save as. You can drag emails to the file system from Thunderbird and they will save as the default EML format or press Ctrl+S. to just save to the active folder. Whatever that might be, it is often not clear in windows.

Again thanks Matt. I didn't know that you could drag and drop e-mails to a non e-mail directory. I have just tried it!

I have all I need thank you, but it is still curious that you can copy and paste a single image from Thunderbird to Word, but not a group of images. But It doesn't really matter now, I have my backup facility.

Again thanks Matt. I didn't know that you could drag and drop e-mails to a non e-mail directory. I have just tried it! I have all I need thank you, but it is still curious that you can copy and paste a single image from Thunderbird to Word, but not a group of images. But It doesn't really matter now, I have my backup facility.

The major issue is how windows clipboard works. The clipboard as shipped with windows really only supports text and images although there are multiple version of those things. Then applications can define extensions to those pre defined things. At a fairly low level most applications pass information to the clipboard in a number of formats, and the pasting application pick a format it understands. Two of the common formats that as a user we rarely hear about are RTF (Rich Text) and HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)

The common expectation of folks is to get images and text and this generally in real terms means RTF as the intermediary format but web tools like mail and browsers tend to use HTML as that is native to their display formats and from this comes the difference. HTML "marks up" text and imports images on the fly from their source files. RTF with it's roots in the early days of word processing as a cross platform document format for Microsoft Word includes both text and images inside the "document" file. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format

I don't know if that makes it clearer or muddier really. It is a simple appearing process that is in reality very complex

Hi Matt Again thank you. Sorry about the delay - but have just been away for a week. You have encouraged me to do more Googling. And I finally have a solution to my problem. I 'save as' my .eml file. Then convert .eml file to .pdf file, then convert .pdf file to .doc file ! Converting .eml file to .doc directly doesn't work for me.