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.

I believe it was Entourage, not Eudora that first had this feature.
Strangely, Entourage - made by Microsoft 😮 - was the best Mail application for the Mac OS for many years.
(that was back in the day when Microsoft's Apple software division was it's cleverest and most profitable).

I know I can make rules to file messages, but being able to rename messages from clients (so that they're more easily searchable - both visibly and Spotlight-wise) would save me HUNDREDS of dollars of my time per week.

Too many of my clients and suppliers send emails with subjects like:
"job", or "yesterday's thing". Even though I've tried to train them over the years (by osmosis :-) ) to use my subject convention of:

PROJECT > Task > specific detail

Surely someone can write a nice like little extension for Mail.app to sort this?

And while they're there, I'd love to be able to choose to open emails from particular clients and bring that window to the front of any other apps. I miss out on a lot of urgent gigs without this feature.

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

I've tried your method twice. The first time it did not change the time stamp; the second time it did. I am using OSX 10.7.5 and Mail 5.3.

On mine it keeps everything the same except for Date Sent. Date Received is not altered.

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.