Fixing “Copy Address” in Mail on 10.6
September 14th, 2009 by ken
A lot of people, including our fearless employee Midori, have noticed a really annoying change in the behavior of the “Copy Address” command in Snow Leopard’s Mail.app.
On 10.5, copying an address using the “Copy Address” contextual menu copied only the email address. On 10.6, it very unhelpfully includes the name portion, with < > around the email part, like “Joe Smith <joe.smith@apple.com>”.
I’m sure there’s a reason someone felt this was the right thing to do, but personally I can’t think of a situation where you’d ever want that.
I did some digging and found a very relevant preference setting, AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard.
To set it, first quit Mail, then go to your Terminal, and copy and paste the following command (all on one line).
defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO
When you open Mail again, copying addresses will be back to the 10.5 behavior.
Yay!
September 14th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Thank you for sharing that fix. It worked perfectly.
You’re right, that was an annoying change and was more like something you’d expect from Microsoft than from Apple.
There are other annoying changes in 10.6 I’ve noticed. One in particular is an extra return at the beginning of text when I copy text from TextEdit to Mail. I haven’t yet figured out the pattern for when this happens, as it doesn’t happen every time. It seems to be related to the place in the page in which I select the text from the .txt document and the place I want to paste into the reply Mail.
I use this process a lot and aside from trying to describe this problem here, hadn’t yet gone to the Apple user forums to describe it.
Again, thanks for showing me how to fix this address copying problem.
September 15th, 2009 at 7:56 am
Great, this has been rally bugging me! Thanks.
September 15th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
I for one really liked the change to include the name with the address. I copy names and addresses from customer suggestions into a document, and previously had to start a reply, choose “Edit Address”, copy, then close the reply (if not needed). Much nicer now.
September 15th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
So there we have it! I knew someone would like it better the 10.6 way.
September 15th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Has anyone noticed that if you drag a group of addresses into BCC it not only lists each address separately but at the end DUPLICATES all of them with the group name!
—
Bye R@Y
September 17th, 2009 at 7:30 am
Thanks Ken. Made my life a lot easier again
’
September 17th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
So, if I ever decided I wanted to change it back to the default SL behavior, would I rerun the command but change it to:
AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool YES
?
Anyway, thanks for the hack!
September 18th, 2009 at 8:05 am
Can someone test what gets passed to a “Service” when an email address is selected with and without this fix?
In 10.4 and 10.5, it would have just been the address like ’steve@apple.com’.
I expect in 10.6 it would be “Steve Jobs ”
Thanks!
September 22nd, 2009 at 12:07 pm
You could change the NO to YES, or alternatively remove the preference with:
defaults delete com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard
Interestingly, this preference is not new to Snow Leopard. What’s changed is the default behavior. If you want to set regular Leopard to include the name, set it to YES.
October 8th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
I have just discovered this page after logging a bug with Apple.
I will see what they say about it… perhaps a UI preference to correct it rather than just assuming everyone will like the new behaviour.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:09 am
Thank you for sharing this! I’ve been bothered by this behavior myself and am really happy I can turn it off!
October 20th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Now that I have Snow Leopard, I tested my service question (see above).
Without the fix, you get this “Steve Jobs ”
With it, you get this: “steve@apple.com”
October 20th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Oops. My angle brackets got eaten. Let me try this:
Without the fix, you get this “Steve Jobs <steve@apple.com>”
October 22nd, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Absolutely brilliant! THANK YOU!
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:05 pm
OMG – Thanks!!!! I hated that. What were they thinking????
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:33 pm
hmmmmm…. This did not work for me.
October 22nd, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Count me in as another grateful person!
October 23rd, 2009 at 1:42 am
For those of you who get a little “weak in the knees” at the thought of working in the terminal, you can also change this behavior using the “Secrets” preference pane available at http://secrets.blacktree.com/
October 23rd, 2009 at 3:43 am
It hadn’t bothered me because I had only been copy and pasting inside Mail, but now you’ve mentioned it I know it’ll affect me at some point..
Thanks.
October 23rd, 2009 at 5:18 pm
G R E A T – Thanx !
October 25th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Yay! I hated that annoying change and thought I’d have to live with it. Not any more. What a lovely fix. Thank you!!!
October 26th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Thank you. I use this all the time and was rather annoyed with the change. I’m very appreciative!
November 1st, 2009 at 9:40 am
I hated this because if you copy an address and paste it into the Mail search box, you had to manually remove the angled brackets before being able to do a search.
Great fix!
November 9th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Thanks! Worked like a charm.