Change "Reply" or "Forward" prefix format

Well, I beg to differ:

On 18/12/2008, at 4:02 PM, Sender wrote:

This is not unprofessional; it's been a standard practice of most email clients for eons. Changing it to the "Microsoft way" would be both wrong and completely unnecessary, as the recipient for a reply already knows they sent the original email.

However, this format:

From: Sender
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2008 12:19 PM
To: Recipient
Subject: Hi, how are you today?

is exactly what you should get when you Forward a message; it's certainly what I get and I would tend to believe that Apple would not change that from 10.4 to 10.5. It is appropriate for forwarded email, since it's likely the recipient would not know who sent it to you originally.

Everyone knows Microsoft is wrong about everything, so if this really bothers you, just click on the Forward button, then change the Subject line to be "Re: <subject> instead of Fw: <subject> and that should suffice.

James_Kanjo wrote:
Hello. I have recently changed from Windows to Mac, and as most of you guys are probably sick of, there are some "changes" I don't want. More explained, I would prefer the "Microsoft way".

When replying or forwarding a message in Apple Mail, you get a prefix just before the original message:

On 18/12/2008, at 4:02 PM, Sender wrote:

However, I don't like this, it looks unprofessional. Compare the above prefix with what is common in Microsoft's mail applications:

From: Sender
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2008 12:19 PM
To: Recipient
Subject: Hi, how are you today?

I like the above so much better! Just for your info, the "Sender" and "Recipient" parts are links to the respective person's e-mail addresses used to send or recieve that message. In Apple Mail, there is no link, so I don't really know who sent the message.

Is there a way to customise Apple Mail's prefix?

No, no way to do that.

Actually, is this something that the Automator could do?

Maybe, but it would need to parse several fields of information and then format it and put it in a specific place, and by the time you get done with that, I really don't think it's worth the effort.

As for Apple allowing the user to change this, I don't think that's likely to happen anytime soon, since this behavior appears to be embedded in the actual code, and you can't get at that or decompile it to modify it.

Mulder

Including prior recipients in the prefix of a reply is very important in a business context. Although the "reply" recipient knows he/she sent the email, knowing who he/she previously copied on the email is very important. Although using "forward" does provide the appropriate prefix, for emails with large cc lists, it's tedious and likely to lead to mistakes. And improperly including an email address in an email thread is a major annoyance, especially for the person whose email is mangled.

Does anyone know a workaround or hack for this problem? Or third party utility that adds this to mail. Every other email program I've used (whether MS or not) includes standard headers in replies.

Thanks,

Check out this post http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1723684. I tried the solution and it worked great. Or try this link http://www.stat.purdue.edu/~sguha/code/replywithheader.html