How can I copy and paste quoted emails from Apple Mail v4.5 into another application?

Question

How can I copy and paste quoted emails from Apple Mail v4.5 into another application?

Hi,

Having just moved from Entourage to Apple Mail on an Exchange back-end, everything is running smoothly except for one thing - when I copy emails that include quotes from replies (i.e. those coloured vertical lines down the left of the message) and paste them into other applications (Word, TextEdit, etc.) these indentations are not preserved, and instead each line starts at the left margin. This makes following interleaved conversations in the pasted document very difficult. It's as though Mail allows me to copy the view onto the message, rather than the source of the message (I believe that Mail simply reinterprets the '>' quote indentations for presentation, but retains these in the stored message).

How can I restore copying of quote indentation in Apple Mail for pasting in other documents?

CT

Mac Pro

Posted on May 11, 2011 1:16 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Roger Wilmut1

Level 10

131,146 points

May 11, 2011 1:41 AM in response to CarpalTunneller

You will need Pages or a sjmilar word processing program for this, TextEdit doesn't appear to be capable. Using Pages:

Open your message. From the 'View' Menu choose "Message>Raw Source'.
Copy the body of the message.
Paste into a Pages Word Processing blank template.
Open Find, click 'Advanced'.
Set 'Find' to '>' (no quotes)
Set 'Replace' to tab (select from the 'Insert' drop-down menu)
Click 'Replace All'.
Set 'Find' to '=20' (no quotes)
Set 'Replace' to a single space.
Click 'Replace all'.

Obviously this will lose the colours which identify the level of quotes but you will have the indentation.

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Answer 2

May 11, 2011 1:50 AM in response to Roger Wilmut1

Thanks Roger,

The Message -> Raw Source part was the bit I needed. I consider the '>' characters to be email quote indentation, and it was these I was trying to preserve - I should probably have been clearer about that.

If anyone from the Apple Mail dev team is reading this, an option to have the right angled bracket to indicate indentation in the standard mail view would be nice.

Cheers,

CT

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