Apple Mail Cut & Paste Problem...

Come on Apple, Iv'e been waiting for 6 months for you to fix this. I've upgraded to Lion in hope it would fix it but no. You pride yourself on a seamless operating system but this is far from seamless with time consuming work arounds. Isn't cut and pasting one of your most basic and original features?

This is so imbarrasing for me after converting a company to os x from windows. I got them to spend $35,000 on macs and now something as basic as a cut and paste doesn't even work properly. The word around the office is they should have stayed with PC's. I have been saying, "I'm sure Apple will fix this soon" don't worry.

I'm a 25 year Apple user from early days and have never felt I had to write a post expressing my dissapointment in Apple but this is soooo crappy!

Hi folks,

I've just spoken to Apple Care. The person that I initially spoke with referred my case to a senior advisor due to the # of people who have reported this issue here. The senior advisor has undertaken to read through all notes on this forum, and to report / liase with Apple engineering to see if this is a known issue, etc. This will take at least 4 biz days, after which the senior advisor will be back in touch with me (estimated for Wed or Thurs next week). I'll continue to post updates.

I have found the following simple work around:

1. Turn off the automatic addition of your signature in mail (i.e. under preferences->signtures->select your mail account and under 'choose signature' select 'none'

2. In new message, write, cut paste etc

3. When finished I then add my signtureby selecting the appropriate one in the signature box on upper right of message window.

Since adopting this approach I have not had the frustrating random pasting bug; but granted it does require an extra click....

Just to repeat, I've had this problem for a long time (pre-Lion) and never ever use Signatures, so FOR ME THIS IS NOT A SIGNATURE PROBLEM! However, using the Command-Option-Shift-Paste suggestion has helped as has selecting in Mail preferences the Include-Selected-text-if-any-otherwise-include-all-text button. I do sometimes use TypeIt4Me but this does not seem to be related to this issue of pasted text jumping to undesired locations.

Thanks, but that's a technique many of us have tried. When I do that my text is still pasted in a paragraph above where I have put my cursor. The difference from using the standard paste command is that in now appears in the same wrong location, but it matches the font style of the preceeding text.

Then I have to copy the text below and paste it in front of the text I was trying to insert.

lidiafromlondon,

This has ALWAYS worked and really isn't the problem.

It is when you go to modify any signature, either in the signature pane; or, once added to the email message, by selecting the signature desired, and then trying to modify it ....... "cut and paste and format chaos" results.

Thanks for the try and input.

Hopefully the other users call to AppleCare that I am sure we are all anxiously awaiting is going to yield some results. I hope and pray they do not brush this off. It is one of those "simple, yet perplexing" things that SHOULD NOT happen!

Wondering if anyone has had a related problem to this "cut and paste" issue in Mail ......

Most, if not all, emails that I am sending out, that have a signature (I think it is always one that I've had the cut and paste issues with) seems to go MUCH slower that an email sent with either an unformatted signature; or, with no signature. I'm talking emails that are essentially the same size as well.

I've also notice that on emails that are reply's to reply's to reply's, etc. (i.e., somewhat of a thread) seem to have this issue as well; and, yes, they also contain one or more of these "notorious" signatures.

I'm talking slowness on the order of taking perhaps 2-4 times as long to upload / send.

Definitely seems to have something to do with this whole issue.

Waiting patiently for the greatest computer in the world (Apple) to fix this!!! Yes, I'm "kissing their *utt"

I think I may have found what is at the root of this problem but I don't know if it is going to help.

After sending messages to myself before and after a corrupt paste command, and then viewing the raw source of those messages, I found that the html formatted version of the message is ballooning with verbose tags.

My basic 14 line signature resulted in 140 lines of html code (I copied it into Dreamweaver to get a better look).

Pasting one word in the middle of a line (which then appeared 2 lines above) increased this to 214 lines of code. The resulting code was a complete mess of nested and jumbled up tags.

I noticed reference within the opening tags to webkit which I had heard of but know litttle about but I did some research and came up with this page : http://www.webkit.org/blog/1737/apple-style-span-is-gone/

If that link gets messed up, just Google apple-style-span-is-gone

As far as I can make out webkit is used by Safari and Mail to display and work with html content. It was originally created by Apple but is open source. The above article is one programmers contribution to the open source project to fix what I suspect is the root cause of all these problems including people's comments about styled messages taking a long time to send. Note the authors comment ...

<the problem> was particularly apparent on mail clients that used WebKit as the editor such as Apple’s Mail ... In some case, an e-email consisting of 3 lines of text consumed 3MB in HTML because of nested spans created by WebKit and other mail clients.

Unfortunately it's not as simple as downloading a newer version of webkit. The webkit.org wiki faq states that ...

Replacing the WebKit.framework that ships with Mac OS X or any of its components with those from a locally built copy or a nightly build of WebKit is HIGHLY discouraged. Doing so will likely leave your system unusuable and cause a tear in the fabric of spacetime—so don't do it!

I don't know for sure that this is the root problem but it does sem to fit and explains why the symptom has been seen across 10.4 - 10.7 and different versions of Mail. I suspect the problem started for each person with the download of a particular Safari version which included a problematic build of webkit.

Anyway, thats about as far as I can take it so I hope someone else is able to pick up the thread and get closer to finding a solution. I suspect, however, that in spite of this knowlege, we may still have to wait for Apple to build a fixed version of webkit into a new Safari version.

My recommended solution pertained to the initial topic, namely: cutting & pasting text in Mail notes that landed somewhere else.

Somehow, the discussion veered into signatures etc.

The solution I recommended "for cutting & pasting notes" WORKS!

The other (signature) issues that I haven't encountered, is a bug I hope my computer doesn't get, as Apple is becoming renown for ignoring voluminous complaints, unless their perpetual (customer) neglect is reported to the proper regulatory entities... SHAMEFUL.

Oh well, I'm tired. Think I'm finally up for a switch (funny Apple tried that too once, convince people to switch. Long time). In since 1992, and yeah it's time for a change. Thanks to Apple. If you can't handle a simple RTF issue in months/years what's next. Not going to waste any more loyality.This time I'll give Elitebook and Ubuntu the chance to prove to be the better option. Tired of moaning, just want ordinary things to work. The least you could expect.

David, and others,

Thanks David for putting a fire under my butt!

I just sent off the following to Apple via the Mail feedback:

Apple,

PLEASE take a look at your own "Apple Support Communities" regarding the ongoing discussion of the Apple Mail Cut & Paste Problem.

We LOVE MAC and APPLE, but we need someone from Apple to help! Surely this seeming lack of any responsiveness to this insidious problem is not the way Apple normally does business. I personally know it isn't. All we want to know is that someone is working on this. Such a basic thing to request - you know, that a feature you have maintained as part of Mail for several years IS indeed a useable feature?

Please take a look at our posts. There are a lot of us that have tried to take the time to adequately describe the nuances of this problem. Can't some wonderful "Genius" from Apple figure out this seemingly ridiculous issue and give us all a quick remedy?!!!!!!!

Thanks for listening - I hope you are listening!

Don Brubaker

David,

Yes, there are all sorts of anomolies in this "issue".

I have been working with signatures the last couple of days, fairly extensively, and was actually enjoying almost error free modification of them, though a small "burp' here an there, but the last day or so it is back to "normal" - MASSIVE weirdness. It seems unpredictable, though I'd bet if we didn't have anything else to do that we'd find some sort of pattern.

Text several lines below where I paste something will change format, or even delete itself.

I also just experienced today - picking a signature for an email and trying to "personalize" it - just a couple words - in the email, the inserted signature did the cut & paste jump, as well as changed some of the formatting. I tried to change the formatting back to what it was supposed to be, then went to another area of the email and all of the sudden, the "bad" formatting jumped back in. I had to re-type the line after entering a hard-return after the line above it, then format it the way I wanted it. This worked, but BIZARRE is the word!

Don