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

Apple Mac Mail, iconEarlier 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, [email protected]. But in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, it would copy the name too, like this: John Doe <[email protected]>.

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!

7 thoughts on “Fixed: Copy/Pasting E-mail Address In Snow Leopard Mail”

  1. 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 =-.

    Reply
  2. Yes yes YES!!! Thank you!!! Ever since I found my MBP being force-upgraded following an unanticipated, unrequested logic board upgrade, I’ve been gnashing my teeth over this. This worked perfectly – thank you *so* much!

    Anne

    Reply
  3. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU! This has been driving me absolutely crazy! I just don’t understand why this would be something you’d want by default.
    You have saved me many a delete.

    elaine .

    Reply
  4. Pingback: Snow Leopard Mail Quirk: Copy/Pasting Addresses — TechPatio

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