The puzzle of extra returns in Mail.app replies
On the Apple Discussion Boards, Steve Jones notes 
that Mail.app has the annoying habit of adding an extra return to paragraphs quoted in a reply.
It doesn’t happen all the time, and it seems to happen whether the reply is in plain text or rich text format.
I’ve noticed this myself and have shared the concern of another poster in the same thread:
I hope my original messages aren’t being displayed to the recipient like this, ’cause it’d really make me look like an idiot!
This is possibly not the most pressing issue facing a user of Mail.app, but it does nag away in the back of my mind.
Why is it so? Can anything be done to fix it?
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Tags: Apple Mail, bugs, extra spaces, looking like an idiot, mail.app, replies, text
June 20th, 2006 at 11:29 pm
I’ve noticed this as well. Could it be related, I wonder, to the fact that Mail.app seems to carry over certain hidden attributes when pasting content from other sources? For example, I’ve got Mail.app set to compose all email in plaintext, but often (not always) when I’m pasting in content from a web page, though the text otherwise assumes the font face and size I’ve set in my Mail.app configuration, all returns that I enter after that pasted text will be double-spaced (actually somewhere between double and single spaced). Doesn’t happen if I choose “Paste and Match Style” from the Edit menu, but you wouldn’t think that would be necessary for a plaintext message. So maybe messages affected by the issue your post also have some text pasted in from an RTF/HTML source? Just a thought.
June 21st, 2006 at 1:12 am
Something to do with Mac vs. Windows vs. Unix linefeeds?
June 21st, 2006 at 3:19 am
It’s a natural result of the way that mail.app translates the > chars in the raw email data into flowed text.
June 21st, 2006 at 9:40 am
Thanks. I am little bit stupid about these things, I’m afraid.
Wouldn’t that give an extra return for every occurance of > ?
Or does it only happen when an > appears by itself like this:
> …end of a paragraph
>
> Start of the next paragraph…
Isn’t it something that is fairly easy to avoid in the app’s code? Why would it be unfixed?
June 21st, 2006 at 12:22 pm
I’ve had the same experience though, with Outlook at work when dealing with HTML-formatted mail. I think it’s the HTML…my Rich Text and Plain Text (yay!) mails look exactly the way I want them, always.
June 22nd, 2006 at 9:04 am
In my experience this is not actually two line returns – rather, when replying, Mail.app sometimes decides to treat line-height as 2 between paragraphs. So what you’re seeing actually is one line, it’s just displayed as two.
If anyone knows how get it to stop this, I’m all ears… it gets really aggravating when doing inline replies.
June 23rd, 2006 at 3:56 am
Nathaniel (*waves hello*),
As far as I can tell, It isn’t 2 lines, but 1.5 on both the start and end of a quoted paragraph. When I break up a paragraph and inject a reply, there is a half line above and below my line. It seems to me to have no effect on the receiving side. It is just annoying.
October 10th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
My guess would be similar to Roquentin’s based on this experience.
If I copy and paste text into your text editor of choice, mine being TextWrangler, and then copy from there, Mail doesn’t show the extra spaces.
Niether Converting to plain-text nor to plain and back to rich text helps. It seems easiest to work around if you paste your text into a text-y program and then copy paste from there to MAIL.APP
Copying from Word (why must folks author attachments in Word when body content would do?) to an editor is less direct than above, but seems to work for me.