A fix for Safari 3 and lost quoted text in Mail replies

Jun 20, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: BrentT

Installing Safari 3 affects quotes in Apple Mail reply messages. If the original message has an attachment, the reply will not display the quoted text, only the name of the attachment appears. I haven't found a fix (other than uninstalling Safari 3), but there are a couple of workarounds. (There's a bit more discussion on this issue in this Apple Discussions thread.)

Here's my clunky workaround: In the original message, before replying, you need to highlight and copy the desired quoted text, then click the Reply button. In the new message, click under the part of the message "On date at time, sender wrote:" and then paste. If you want the quote to have the Mail quote line to the left, highlight the text you just pasted, then press Command-' (that's the single quote mark).

The second, more elegant, workaround requires a change to Mail's preferences: On the Composing tab, select Include selected text if any, otherwise include all in the 'When quoting text...' section of the panel. Once that's set, in the original message with the attachment, select all (Command-A) before clicking the Reply button. The new message window will then contain all the original text, but will not list the attachment.

[robg adds: I'm not seeing this behavior on my machine, and I think it's because the problem only affects HTML-formatted email (according to the Apple Discussions thread, at any rate). I use this hint to force all incoming email into plain text, so I never see any HTML email. I'm not certain, but setting the Composing tab's Message Format pop-up to Plain Text (which is how my machine is set up) might also avoid this bug, since the new message would then be composed in plain text mode.]

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