Apple Mail Cut & Paste Problem...

I have been trying to copy a draft email that I have created and paste it into a new email with a signature. When I place the cursor BEFORE the signature and "ctr-v" to paste, it places the text/message AFTER the signature. I have done this many times and have changed the "place selected quote above signature" box over and over and it has no effect. So now the only work around that I have come up with is to choose no signature, paste the text from the draft, then choose to include signature after the text is in the email. BIG hassle, when I am sending hundreds of "personalized" emails to clients. The same happens with photos I want to appear before my signature. It always places my signature first, then the pic...

Please help. Using Mail 5.2 (1257) and mac OS 10.7.3, trying to use rich text...

Just made the switch to Mac, and put all my email accounts into Mail...and can't even compose and edit a message because of this awful bug!

I try to copy and paste something into the message, it goes somewhere else entirely.

I try to backspace/delete in front of a lower line to join it up to a higher line, it also goes somewhere else entirely.

I can't spend all this extra time typing everything over and over again when I NEED to be able to quickly cut and paste or make other simple edits. This is an inexcusable bug, and it's making the transition to mac even harder.

Really starting to regret switching to Mac.

I'm convinced that the problem is quite obviously the awful over-complicated HTML that Mail generates for Rich Text messages.

I looked at the following folder:

~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Signatures

and noticed that most of my Signatures, which I use more as a template, were 100 KB or more with some at around 250 KB. There are no images in any of these Signatures, just HTML text and 250+ KB of HTML is just plain silly!

So I did a quick experiment of copying & pasting a couple of these Signatures into a new document in TextEdit, then copying them back into Mail as a new Signature and 250 KB suddenly become 20 KB. Also those new signatures started working better (when you try editing them within Mail) than the previous ones though still not perfect.

Therefore my conclusion is that Mail Rich Text messages get progressively bigger & corrupted the more editing you do; hence a few Cut, Copy & Pastes can just create a giant mess - this also explains why some of the replies to my emails show weird'n'wacky formatting too (suddenly a paragraph in the middle is all in bold at a super-large text size).

My workaround

For now, my workaround is to just copy a Signature/Template over to TextEdit - do all my editing there - then copy it back to the Mail message - tedious but at least it works.

BTW for those inclined - the Signatures in the above folder are just HTML files so you can actually hand-edit them as well (for external image links, etc.).

Hi folks,

I've been trying to chase down a solution with Apple Support. As of today, I was told by a senior advisor that the problem is being looked at by Apple's engineering team, that they are looking for a solution, but that there is no timeframe for a fix. The problem appears to be related to html code in the signature block. The senior advisor that I spoke with has also experienced this issue on an intermittent basis!

I also mentioned the issues with formatting fonts in outgoing messages. There are separate support community threads about this, and a company called MessageFont has links to a number of these threads here: http://messagefont.com/about/

I suspect that these issues may be inter-related. There are times when I have formatted text into a particular font, and copy/paste info into the message using cmd-option-shift-v. When I view the message, all of the text appears to be of the same font/size. However, when a recipient replies to my message, the inserted text sometimes shows up in a different font, size and color. This is really frustrating, as it makes my business messages appear unprofessional.

I will continue to post updates as new info becomes available.

The problem is not that it "appears to be related to html code in the signature block" - it quite simpy is the HTML code generated by Mail in Rich Text messages!

Mail gets into a real mess when you start using different fonts, styles, colours, bulleted lists, etc. in a message (plus a bit of cut, copy & paste) - looking at the HTML that's generated, which ends up with (literally!) dozens & dozens of nested divs & spans all with inline styles that appear to be doing the same thing, it's no wonder that other email systems just can't cope with the garbage that's being thrown at them - so when you receive a reply the original formatting is often quite different to that which you sent (happens to me quite frequently).

What Apple need to do here is simply assign a small team to rebuild the HTML engine within Mail (others have mentioned it's derived from WebKit).

At least they're now admitting that there is a problem 🙂

Thanks tosharae for conintuing with following up on this. I was wondering what was happening since "somehow" it seems google all of the sudden was calling all my email notifications from this thread "junk" and deleting them ...... H'mmmm

Anyway, to the point

Wanted to chime in on sharae statement about recipient's replies to emails that I've sent with this "signature text/formatting with a mind of its own" ...... basically, that yes, when someone is replying to an email I've sent with some of this text from a signature, it will come back in this reply sometimes with an email that is "a mile" long (somewhat exagerated, but not much). Basically the signature does not stay intact in the format sent to someone. This also is intermittent though.

As with sdj2012, it would seem this "webkit" that apple is "farming" this signature mail feature to, is a big suspect.

It seems like Apple would have learned that ONLY Apple can do things right!!!!!

Don't know that much about webkit except that it seems like it is a similar "consortium" to those behind Firefox; and, at least from what I'm experiencing and hearing, Firefox is experiencing a lot of anomolies (such as being very slow and jerky for Mac OSX) - to the point I've switched to google Chrome. Perhaps this is way off point, but thought I'd throw it out there.

Boy, looks like there isn't any news on this issue since I last checked in a couple of weeks ago.

Anyone heard anything?

I've been having an increasingly hard time with this.

My latest "thing" is creating and formatting a signature; and then, when I go to use that signature in an email, it COMPLETELY changes all the text formatting I made in the original signature - like I basically had bold titles with some standard paragraphs in regular (non-bold) text. Upon picking that signature, everything turns to bold; and, if I try to re-format, the text jumps around, or turns to weird undiscernable garbage.

This is just CRAZY.

There is something definitely wrong with this, but Apple seems to remain silent?!!!!

No further word from Apple Support. I suspect they won't be back in touch unless they have news from Engineering about a bug fix. I think others need to report this directly to Apple Care to get appropriate engineering resources put onto fixing the problem.

Hi, I pushed this through Applecare, was escalated to senior engineer. Was able to reproduce the problem & again on a fresh install. The engineer was also able to reproduce the problem. After several weeks, he came back to me to say that it is now with engineering & a fix will be released but he was not able to say when...

But the more people who report this to Applecare the more priority it will be given...

i haven't read all of posts in the 8 pages before me, but need to take a stand for Outlook users in case it hasn't been addressed.

this EXACT thing happens in Outlook

I have had my mac book pro for 4 weeks .. and was going looney over this issue.

plain text or html .. didn't matter.. pasting anything behind existing text, went on the line above 😟

I honestly didn't believe that deleting my signature would fix it, but it did !!

I will call applecare tomorrow to get on the bandwagon, but i am so thankful to find it isn't a fig newton of my imagination that this was happening.

whoever figured that out.. thank you!

The problem for me was, when I would want to paste something where my curser was, it would end up on the line above. I did not want to delete my signature or adjust it in any way just for this "C&P" problem (like I have read in some posts), so what I now do is, I hit the space bar a few times, highlight the "empty spaces", and paste it over the "empty spaces". Problem solved.

For example:

Beginning of email

1) Today we contacted this company - website here (In bold is where I wanted to paste what I had copied)

Problem with copy and paste within email

website here (this is where it ended up)

1) Today we contacted this company -

Solution

1) Today we contacted this company - " " (hit the space bar a few times for the empty spaces > highlight empty spaces > CMD + V)

Hope this was a help to anybody who needed it.

Best Regards,

B

hello there,

as all you others posting before,

I really got some grey hair about this copy-paste-thing.

seems like it really is something about formatted signatures.

so you might write email without signature – great idea!

or take care your signature does not contain any formatted text.

cmd+shift+T will convert anything to plain text in mail,

copy and re-insert your signature text into the signature field in settings.

if you can live with plain text in your signtures, this seems to work.

try designing something simple...

best regards,

vg3006

Apple mail is a complete embarrasment and exercise in frustration to use. We'vr played the "Copy Hopping" game for over a year now, since Leopard. That's not all, there has been a bunch of us very vocal on Macintouch.com voicing other html issues with mail.app. This app should be renamed Embarrasment_Mail.app since html under the hood is such a mess.

In addition to copy hopping inability to edit messages, all the html outgoing message is bloated and messy. When you receive replies back from windows users the html code is all messed, dropped fonts, wierd sizes, wrong emphasis. It can make a complete embarrasment out of any email.

There is no way to check your html either (very apple thing), however windows XP version of Outlook had a tab where you could look at the html in the message. Nice, clean, concise. If you look at returned html in any Mail.app message there are hundreds of screwed up tags, duplicates. Bloat beyond belief. It's a collosal mess that surprises me hasn't been looked at earlier.

I am SO GLAD finally this may get some engineering attention. The two most vital programs on any PC seem ignored by engineering-- Mail and address book (what an opportunity for improvement there too).

So, it appears we've all given up on getting this issue resolved with the latest post being almost 2 months ago?

Anyone hear anything, talked with Apple further, switched from Mac to Windows?!!! (NEVER!).

I will have to admit that I've almost given up and am just living with EXTREMELY sub-standard capabilities when compared with Apple's general level of quality. Apple really has DROPPED the ball on this one!

Hi

I have got feed back from apple as posted last March:-

"Hi, I pushed this through Applecare, was escalated to senior engineer. Was able to reproduce the problem & again on a fresh install. The engineer was also able to reproduce the problem. After several weeks, he came back to me to say that it is now with engineering & a fix will be released but he was not able to say when...

But the more people who report this to Applecare the more priority it will be given..."

I would imagine that most people will wait to see if this is fixed in Mountian Lion, In the meantime, if you have applecare keep reporting this.

Gareth