quoting/threading phenomena in mail.app -- due to problems in incoming messages?

Thanks for your response.

Try as I may, I cannot see how your fix differs from commanding Format-->Make Plain Text without selecting anything. Both convert the entire reply to plain text. I would like to avoid that, for reasons I give in my original post.

Am I missing something really obvious?

What is the specific function of shift-select versus ordinary select? When I first read your suggestion, I hoped shift-select meant something like "select the block structure which contains the highlighted text", which would be great! However, I cannot detect any functional difference between shift-select and plain select. And, as yet, I've found no way of removing the block structure for a particular bit (paragraph or group of paragraphs) of formatted reply.

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This tip for copy-and-pasting text style works in mail.app. Using this method, I can effectively remove the style of some reply text in a formatted reply by copying the style from a different, plain text message and then pasting that style. (Obviously, not very convenient!) But this affects the text styling only. I cannot see any effect on the block structure.

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Bonus questions: In the case of emails from some people, while struggling to insert interspered replies, I can transiently see what I believe are the block structures I'm fighting with. Mail.app shows thick black rectangles, with rounded corners, around apparent text blocks. But this happens unpredictably. In the most difficult case I've seen so far --the test case I'm using now-- I can't make this happen. Do thick-rounded-edge rectangles indeed show the block structure (e.g. blockquotes)? What's the trick to make these visible, reliably?

haavee:

Thanks for your reply on this thread.

And thanks for the confirmation: Yes, often difficult, and completely unworkable in some cases.

To my surprise, I've been able to find very few people reporting similiar observations. Very little about this issue at all on the web.

I looked for command-key variations on Format --> Make Plain Text, hoping for a block action, but none I tried was any different.

Here is my current view of the issue:

• For formatted messages, each email client operates differently. If there is a standard it seems to be no more robust than "use simple HTML for formatted messages".

• The "can't insert" issue, as well as those mysterious rectangle-surrounded blocks, seems very correlated with the presence of html <div> sections in the message. It is awkward to experiment, so I've only done a limited amount. My observations so far:

-- I don't think you can insert text anywhere "inside" a <div>, and mail.app seems to treat <div> as a "sticky" attribute -- e.g/ very difficult/impossible to remove without deleting the text inside. The copy-style method doesn't seem to affect <div> tags.

-- Based on one case, it appears that message bodies composed of back-to-back <div> sections are impervious to inserts anywhere. (The email client used by one particular person with whom I've corresponded seems to build messages out of --you guessed it-- back-to-back <div> sections. Putting on my HTML coders hat -- I cannot see any sense at all in doing this. Smells to me like a kludge/hack, as you prefer.)

• What about an applicable mail.app add-in? I can find mail.app add-ins, but it seems the mail.app tech info (API) isn't public, so those that exist are based on guesswork about how it works. This means that add-ins must be re-tooled possibly for each new version of mail.app. Altogether, not encouraging for add-in developers. And, yes, consistent with that the range of functionality I've seen is rather limited. So, I've given up looking in the add-in category.

• Applescript has commands for controlling mail.app generally, but I didn't see anything approaching the level of function necessary to remove <divs> by global search-and-replace. (I'm far from an Applescript expert, so it is very possible I missed something.) Nor did I see any general command such as Clean up dodgy HTML in message. (I can dream!)

The only bit of progress I've had is finding TextSoap: http://www.unmarked.com/textsoap/ which may have promise. But I have had no time to evaluate it and it may be a month or so before I get a chance to check it out.

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Looking at the upper right of the window in which I'm composing this message, there's a button "HTML" that lets me see --and edit-- the underlying HTML. On first glance, there's not enough functionality to, say, efficiently clean up all insert-resistant blocks in a message, but it looks practical to clean up individual blocks, and maybe that's all it would take. Though I imagine that the user base for these forums is not very different from that of mail.app, I'm guessing adding this function to mail.app isn't even a dim possibity. Oh, well...

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I note you are happy with your solution, so I'll try see if a variation of it might help me.

Thanks,

h.2