Fixed: Copy/Pasting E-mail Address In Snow Leopard Mail

Earlier this week I wrote about how Mail.app in Snow Leopard changed the way e-mail addresses would be copied to your clipboard, when you right click on a “From” name on an e-mail, to copy their e-mail address. The way it used to work, like in Leopard, was that it simply copied the e-mail address, john@doe.com. But in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, it would copy the name too, like this: John Doe <john@doe.com>.

The new method is really annoying to those of us who copies e-mail addresses a lot, like when we need to do a lookup in a database for user accounts or similar stuff, you’d then have to doctor the pasted text string to remove name, “<” and “>”.

The Solution

Thanks to Mac Daddy World, I now found a solution to this problem. As I suspected, there would be a simple terminal command to execute that’ll make it all go away, back to the way Leopard Mail used to do it.

Here’s what you do: Quit Mail then launch Terminal (find it in Spotlight if you don’t know how to get there). Now simply copy and paste the following piece of code into Terminal on a single line and hit enter:

defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO

To undo, simply change “NO” to “YES” in the above code and run it again.

Yay, me too!

Tagged as: Mac OS X, Mail.app, Snow Leopard, Terminal

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Phil September 23, 2009 at 19:51

Thanks for this. This is one thing that really bugged me with Snow Leopard.
Phil´s last blog ..I Ran My First Great North Run

Klaus @ TechPatio September 24, 2009 at 10:36
Follow @TechPatio on Twitter: Exactly – bugged the h**** out of me too I’m glad to finally have it fixed.