Mail - change subject line of received email

Actually, there is a workaround for this. Drag the email into your Drafts folder, open it and edit the subject line. Save it and drag it back to whatever folder you desire. This works, but the drawback is that the time/date stamp change to be the time and date you edited the subject line. Not pretty, but it does work.

Dave,

Use "Redirect' instead of dragging.

Highlight the message and hit "Redirect". Edit the subject line and close the message saving as a draft. Open the "Draft" folder and move the message into the original mailbox. Open the original mailbox and the new edited message appears. You can then delete the original message because nothing has changed in the redirected message except for the edited subject line. It keeps the sender's name and the date you first received the message.

This site tells you how to edit the subject of a message. I just tested using OS X 10.8.5 and it worked, without altering the time & date stamp, or the original sender info.

http://email.about.com/od/macosxmailtips/qt/et_edit_receive.htm

Steps copied below:

• Drag and drop the desired message out of Mac OS X Mail onto the Desktop.
• Ctrl-click on the message copy on the Desktop.
• Select Open With | TextEdit from the menu.
• Make the desired changes to the message source.

  To change a message's subject, look for "Subject:" at the beginning of a line starting from the top. (hint, you can use 'Command-F' to bring up a search window to help you find the "Subject").

• Close TextEdit saving the document.
• Ctrl-click on the message on the Desktop again.
• Select Open With | Mail from the menu this time.
• Now select Message | Copy To followed by the message's original folder from the menu in Mac OS X Mail.
• Close the message window.
• Delete the message copy from your Desktop.
• Optionally, delete the original message in Mac OS X Mail. (when I tested this, the original message was no longer there. Not sure what happened to it, but the changes worked without editing the time, date, or original sender information.)

Highlight the message and hit "Redirect". Edit the subject line and close the message saving as a draft. Open the "Draft" folder and move the message into the original mailbox. Open the original mailbox and the new edited message appears. You can then delete the original message because nothing has changed in the redirected message except for the edited subject line. It keeps all of the other original data.

@Baron875, your answer is not entirely correct. Your method does NOT save all the original data. The original date of the message is changed to the date and time that you edited it! For business, this fixes one problem but creates another!! The only real answer to this question, which has been frustrating me ever since I switched to Mac, is to go back to Microsoft Outlook where it is simple to change the subject line... something that should be a no-brainer function for any mail client programmer. I really like Mail overall, but some of these idiotic shortfalls drive me nuts. I am becoming more and more convinced that Apple does NOT have the brightest programmers, as some people like to think.

Hmmm, I thought it did but decided to re-check just to be sure. Well, it doesn't change the date and time on my machine. It seems to keep all of the original data for me and several others that have responded to my message. I'm curious why it doesn't on your machine and would like to investigate this with you if you have some time.

Thanks,

Rick

rictor.junk@gmail.com

Is it possible that the Date Sent you're referring to is really the Resent Date?

On my version, Mail 4.6, OSX 10.6.8, using "Long Headers" only shows "Date" which shows the originally received date and "Resent Date" which is the date I modified the subject. Typically only "Date" shows up in my message window because I use "Default Headers" and "Date"(received date) is really the date I'm trying to preserve and is the only date in the original message as "resent date" is generated only after I re-direct the message. I can live with that but you guys are right, I wish Apple would expand their mail editing capabilities.

Maybe Einstein was wrong when he said, "Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results." He apparently never had to deal with Apple Mail.

Did you try two different messages or the same message twice? I've never tried the latter.

@baron875: Yes, it can be insanity! I tried changing to "Long Headers" to see more info, but I can't find the option anywhere. (My version is 6.2.) I did try the method you cited before about editing the subject line, and it seemed to work this time. Was I doing something wrong before?...who the **** knows. Insane.

Here's another insanity: Why do they make it so difficult to deal with attachments?? Again, coming from Outlook, it was easy! If I wanted to put an image in the body of the text OR just make it an attachment...I could do that! In Mail, it's all screwy. As hard as I try, I have no idea what it will look like on the receiving end.

@baron875: I just tried it again and it worked for me as it did for you, so I am going with best 2 out of 3 wins. I think this method is ok as a workaround but is sure is a pain in the butt they don't deploy some imagination after all these years of suffering with this deficiency in Mail.

@ericfromwi: In Lion they changed the terminology slightly. Try this - select the email message, then click:

View | Message | All Headers if you want to go back to the default it is View | Message | Default Headers

I did try the same message twice and perhaps that's why I might have seen the time stamp change after the second change. I can't remember exactly what I did but your method seems to work as a bandaid. Thanks for sharing it.

@iBlick: As long we're all geeking out here... here's a good laugh. I did what you said about finding a message's "Default Headers." Thanks, because the info is indeed in there. But check this out... here is the info that shows on one of my emails when "Default Headers" is revealed. Totally ridiculous (the info I was actually looking for is bold):

Mime-Version: 1.0 (Mac OS X Mail 6.2 \(1499\))

Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

X-Apple-Encoding-Hint: 513

X-Universally-Unique-Identifier: 62e52c95-8938-4562-aad9-98da557dfc0b

X-Apple-Base-Url: x-msg://522/

X-Apple-Mail-Remote-Attachments: YES

Resent-Message-Id: <BLU174-W225E5E7F2A6722B4FE88AAD4300@phx.gbl>

X-Apple-Windows-Friendly: 1

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Resent-Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:11:52 -0600

Message-Id: <77263601-1B8C-4BCD-8668-17AE09B5EACA@wi.rr.com>

X-Uniform-Type-Identifier: com.apple.mail-draft

I know some of my rabid Mac friends who make fun of Windows messages, saying that they say are, "useless" and/or "meaningless." Ha! Really??

You can select what gets displayed in the "Default headers" mode by going to "preferences>viewing>show header detail>custom". From there you can add or delete items in the Default header to make it look exactly like you want it to.