Fixing a little annoyance in Snow Leopard’s Mail.app
For some reason that is difficult to fathom, Apple changed the way Mail.app copies the text of email address in Snow Leopard.
In the olden days, right clicking on the sender of an email produced a contextual menu with the option to “Copy Address”. And that’s what it did. Then you could paste happily it an email or whatever else you were working on.
Not anymore.
Now, in Snow Leopard’s Mail, when you do the same thing, it copies the person’s name as well and encloses the email address in angle brackets. Annoying.
Ken Aspeslagh at Mac Daddy World has discovered the fix, buried away in Mail’s preferences file.
In order to return to the old way of copying an address, all you need to do is close Mail. Open Terminal and type in:
defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO
Open Mail again, and everything is as it should be. If only all niggles in Mail were that easy to solve!
[Via Big Mac Daddy 
]
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Tags: 10.6, Apple Mail, little annoyance, mail.app, snow leopard
October 26th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Hey, thanks!
Good to see you back.
October 26th, 2009 at 1:14 am
Funny, I noticed that the other day and thought that it was a bug fix rather than a regression.
Of course, my need is pretty specific, I have made some friends in China but my ability to do pinyin data entry is still pretty abysmal so being able to copy their names in Hanzi (chinese characters) is a real benefit. Before I couldn’t access their names since it would only copy the address, I would need to go into Raw Source.
October 26th, 2009 at 1:39 am
Very nice. Thank you.
Lynn
October 26th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Didn’t work for me.
October 26th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Didn’t work for me either
October 27th, 2009 at 12:46 am
@SOS says:
>Didn’t work for me.
you need to stop mail.app before.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:47 am
I don’t have snow leopard installed but if the text is as you describe, it is a feature. It sounds like a properly formed mail address (I can’t recall the RFC right now). The angle brackets tell the parser “Ignore that other gibberish. look here for the real address”
Paste it into an email and see if it work.
October 27th, 2009 at 7:07 am
Funny, the picture of the girl freaking out – that looks like a 12in Powerbook. That computer won’t even run Snow Leopard.
October 27th, 2009 at 7:45 am
Even if you stop Mail app (keep it closed) then do as you state in the terminal, it still does not work.
Tried it several times,
please expound
October 27th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
@joe, are you running Snow Leopard Mail.app? Just an obvious question before delving into troubleshooting.
You used two non-standard words to describe the running state of Mail.app — “stop” and “closed” — the correct term is “quit”. Did you quit Mail.app before executing the command in Terminal.app?
As for the new behaviour, I prefer it copying the name and address in one shot, but I wish the “Paste and Match Style” command that is common in most Cocoa-based apps now would result in just the email address portion being pasted. That way, we’d have the best of both.
October 29th, 2009 at 4:30 am
Thanks for this!
On here it looks like there is a space after the hyphen, but once I pasted and saw that isn’t so, it worked just fine.
November 6th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
didn’t work for me either
November 6th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Hmmmm… Maybe try Secrets which does the heavy-lifting for you.
November 13th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Thanks so much.
Joe Japes
econtechnologies.com
December 13th, 2009 at 1:36 am
thanks, this was very useful!
December 14th, 2009 at 12:23 am
[...] a tip I just read over at the brilliant Hawk Wings [...]
December 28th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Worked fine for me, thanks! Nice trick.