Joe asked me a question at the Mullies meeting this week.
Hi Matt
Further to our conversation at Mulligrubs, I have forwarded the email in question.
It was sent to me via Outlook Express and as you suggested this may not be suitable to on forward via Thunderbird. When I have sent this particular message previously in the same circumstances, the message follows the text as well as being sent as an attachment.
Joe’s email has an animated picture attached to it which is the punchline to a joke. The email is sent as html which is the same language that webpages are written in. So just like webpages can have embedded graphics, animations and the like the email can too.
The problem comes when the person opening the email has a different program than the person who sent it. As I discussed with Joe in some instances Thunderbird doesn’t show the email the same as Outlook Express or Outlook would. This is the same sort of program difference that causes poorly written webpages to look different in Firefox and Internet Explorer.
One solution to Joe’s problem is to save the email as an external file and then attach that file to an email for forwarding. This is often a good idea as it gives you a brand new clean email to write in without forwarding all those friends addresses, maybe to a spammer or infected computer.
To get the file and details out of a html email the easy way is to save it as a html file. Just open the email - the original one maybe attached if it has been ‘forwarded as attachment’. Drill down to the message with the joke and then:
in Thunderbird click File Menu - Save as - File – Html
In Outlook or Outlook Express Click File – Save As – Choose HTML under the File type pull down
Now you can send the html file you saved to your computer as an attachment to an email or view it in your browser (Internet Explorer / Firefox)
One of the problems with the email Joe received is that the image is an animated GIF. It's like a cartoon - a few different frames slightly changed that give the impression of movement/animation 
See more about GIFs here.
A lot of picture viewer programs won't show the image moving even if you save/extract it right. If you extract it right you should always see it moving if you open it in your browser (Internet Explorer / Firefox)
Hope this was helpful
Oh and here is Joe’s picture for you
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