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 ]