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Quickly copy entire message contents in Mail Apps
In Mail.app, you can copy the contents of an email message by clicking on the subject of that mail in the Mailbox view, and hitting Command-C rather than opening up the email, clicking on the body, selecting all, then copying. This also copies all the headers for a piece of mail as well. You can then paste this into a new piece of email (it doesn't seem to export this clipboard outside of mail.app).

This is particularly useful if you are trying to put the contents of several pieces of mail into a new piece. While you can't command-select and do this trick, you can select subject, copy then paste, and then repeat much faster than you could open each one and copy the contents.

[Editor's note: Neat trick, and I found a way to export the data as well. Although this odd Mail clipboard doesn't seem to paste into any application, it will, for some reason, paste into Stickies. So copy it from Mail, paste it into stickies, then select the pasted text and copy again. You now have the message on the real clipboard, and can paste it elsewhere with ease.]*censored*
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Forwarding mail in Mail.app
Authored by: rnward on Oct 21, '02 12:12:29PM

If you want to forward multiple emails to the same person, select all the subjects in the upper pane, select "Forward Message" from the Message menu, and they'll all be in one new email. Very nice.



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The View Pane (Pain)
Authored by: bjast on Oct 21, '02 01:37:19PM

Neat tip. I don't use the view pane however (which apparently is the only way this tip can work) But I did discover if you leave the view pane open ever-so-slightly, the tip still works. Now if someone could just find a way to put this copied material in the true Clipboard without the two step stickies trick.

Bill J.



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The View Pane (Pain)
Authored by: bjast on Oct 21, '02 01:37:44PM

Neat tip. I don't use the view pane however (which apparently is the only way this tip can work) But I did discover if you leave the view pane open ever-so-slightly, the tip still works. Now if someone could just find a way to put this copied material in the true Clipboard without the two step stickies trick.

Bill J.



[ Reply to This | # ]
The View Pane (Pain)
Authored by: bjast on Oct 21, '02 01:38:30PM

Neat tip. I don't use the view pane however (which apparently is the only way this tip can work) But I did discover if you leave the view pane open ever-so-slightly, the tip still works. Now if someone could just find a way to put this copied material in the true Clipboard without the two step stickies trick.

Bill J.



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Clipboard weirdness explained
Authored by: andrewz on Oct 21, '02 02:43:15PM
There seems to be some confusion about the existence of more than one general clipboard. There is in fact one general pasteboard (Cocoa term for clipboard), and it can contain more than one representation of the copied information. When you copy something, a program can put several representations of data onto the pasteboard, such as plain text, rich text, etc. When you paste something, a program takes the richest possible representation of the data from the pasteboard. If there aren't any forms that it understands, nothing happens.

Each data representation on the pasteboard is identified by a description. When you copy a message in Mail, it puts two representations onto the general pasteboard, with these descriptions:

  • RFC822MessageDatasPboardType
  • NeXT RTFD pasteboard type
The first one is only used by Mail. The latter is used by any Cocoa application that accepts rich text, such as TextEdit, Stickies, or Mail itself. When you paste into one of these apps and then copy again, the pasteboard then contains:
  • NeXT Rich Text Format v1.0 pasteboard type
  • NSStringPboardType
  • NeXT plain ascii pasteboard type
  • etc.
Now you can paste into most programs that accept plain or rich text. It would more useful if Mail also put a plain text version of the message on the clipboard when you copy a message!

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