MacOS – Apple Mail – Making Reply and Forward Attributions the SAME

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Sorry for such a simplistic sounding question, but I haven't found any resolution to this. As I migrate users from Outlook to Mail, this is one of the biggest things I miss…

When you forward a message in Mail.app, it gives full attribution, listing complete To, From, Subject, and Date information. However, when you reply, all you get is "On so-and-so wrote:" and nothing else. The big missing piece is the To information. In a corporate environment, it is really important to see who had been written to in a historical message in a thread, since the distribution group often changes from reply to reply.

Is there any way to get the full attribution in replies as well as forwards? It must be possible. I know that you can edit the Delayed.strings file which can help space things out more desirably, but I'd like to also have all the lines (From, Date, To, Subject) there in exactly the same way.

Any ideas or advice would be most appreciated 🙂

Best Answer

I'd be very interested in this if you can pull it off, as that reply header format is super annoying to me.

For the previous version of Mail, a guy at Purdue wrote a plug-in to do exactly what we're looking for here. He's since moved off OS X so he isn't maintaining the code for Lion, but it might serve as a good starting point for you. The source is at: https://github.com/saptarshiguha/ReplyWithHeaders

The author gave me the following tip (all Greek to me, but might be helpful to you):

Fixing this to work in Lion might be as simple as including new UUIDs (plugins require something called UUID compatibility IDs), or a rewrite (the Mail internals might have changed).

Hope this helps! I know a lot of people that would be very excited to fix this little shortcoming in Lion Mail.

-Rob

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Sending an email to senders of selected emails in Mail.app

Try this AppleScript (using 10.7.3).

Select the messages you want to reply to before executing the script.

tell Application "Mail"
activate
set selectedMessages to selection
set countMessages to (count of selectedMessages)
if countMessages is equal to 0 then
    display alert "No Messages Selected" message "You must select a message first."
else
set theMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {visible:true, subject:"My Subject", content:"My Body"}
repeat with i from 1 to countMessages
    set theInput to item i of selectedMessages
set theName to sender of theInput
tell theMessage
    make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {name:theName}
end tell
end repeat
end if
end tell

MacOS – How to sort mail.app conversations by subject rather than sender

Ah! I think I have actually found the answer. In the Mail.app with Lion, it sorts by whether or not there is a Re: in the subject. So all of those ticket emails up there, which start with the ticket tag, would thread correctly if they started with Re: [#tag] instead. I am about to add Re: to my RT subject lines, to fix this problem for my own ticket traffic.

Best Answer

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Sending an email to senders of selected emails in Mail.app

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