Two smart tricks with Mail’s address fields
A poster on macOSXHints points out a smart use for the “tokenised” email addresses 
that Mail.app places in its To: and Cc: fields.
Coincidently, I stumbled across another unexpected use for this at work today.
The macOSXHints poster explains how to quickly enter email addresses in to a web form by first entering the name into a new Mail.app message. Mail auto-completes the names, providing those nice aqua tokens.
These can be be selected and dragged over to the web form, where they transform into a comma-separated list of email addresses. Clever.
But there’s more. Today at work I had to suggest the creation of a new internal mailing list. Rather than type all the email addresses out, I tried the same trick.
I entered the names in the To: field of the message, let Mail auto-complete them, then selected them all and dragged them into the body of the email. Voila! — a nice, comma-separated list of email addresses appeared:
This is not a high-use tip. I’ve been using a Mac for four years now, and this is the first time I was moved to try it. Still, it’s nice to know that it is there, waiting for me to discover all over again when I need to do this in 2011.
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Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, email addresses, mail.app, mailing list, Productivity, web forms
April 4th, 2007 at 12:56 am
I have use this quite a bit before – but in a bit different way. There have been many times when I have wanted a list of email addresses. If you create an addressbook group (or smart group), you can create the email to the group – and Mail will expand it into the individual email addresses – which can then be copied or dragged as described above.
April 4th, 2007 at 1:14 am
Love your blog but… it’s “Voila” not “Viola,” don’t ask me why but it drives me crazy when I see this (very common) mistake… I know… Not a life threatening type problem but…
April 4th, 2007 at 1:28 am
Quite so. Je suis désolé. You are right to expect better.
April 4th, 2007 at 2:24 am
It’s better than “walla,” which I’ve seen with increasing frequency… sigh.
Nice tip, Tim.
April 4th, 2007 at 3:05 am
What drives me crazy is “definately”.
(although not in this post)
April 4th, 2007 at 4:12 am
mr hawk wings meant the colour I’m sure… ;-)
p.s. how did you setup your email wit that column to the right!! i need to get instructions on how to customize my email form to be like that!! and then it’s voilà ! 4 me 2. or you can colour me purple…..
April 4th, 2007 at 5:27 am
vanni, that’s the sidebar that comes with MailTags – a tagging plugin for Mail.
April 4th, 2007 at 5:49 am
Thankfully, I’ve never mispelled anything. Nevahhhhhhrrrrrr!!!
=)
April 4th, 2007 at 5:50 am
That sidebar is a program that plugs into your Mail.app called MailTags.
If they publish the site I put in the “Website” field, it should be a link to the MailTags site. If not, just Google “Mail tags” and click on the first link.
April 4th, 2007 at 7:04 am
Vanni it is from here
http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html
I have not tried it but looking into it now.
April 4th, 2007 at 8:20 am
TO YANN: I dont know if it was corrected i the post but it does say Voila…
April 4th, 2007 at 8:58 am
Instead of saying “a poster…” twice, would it have been so hard to state the person’s name? Give a little credit where it is due. You seem to do this quite often and it’s not very friendly.
April 4th, 2007 at 9:22 am
> how did you setup your email wit that column to the right!!
Searcheth and thou shall find!
http://www.ask.com/web?q=mailtags
April 5th, 2007 at 12:36 am
I’ve used this shortcut before on my Mac systems, and it’s handy, especially if I am trying to forward somebody else’s contact information.
Outlook also does this (allows you to drag addresses from the header of a message into the body). Interestingly, it doesn’t allow you to drop the address to anyplace other than an Office application (Word, for instance, NOTEPAD won’t accept it). Outlook’s dragging also has an interesting side-effect of removing it from the header…
April 5th, 2007 at 1:06 am
wouldn’t an “Export…” command in Address Book be great? Sometimes I’d like to easily transport some Address Book entries into Excel.