Betalogue

Two weeks ago, I reported that, in Snow Leopard, the “Copy Address” command in the contextual menu when you right-click on an e-mail address in a message header in Mail now copies the entire “From:” field, including the name and other superfluous information.

Then I reported that I got an e-mail response from Apple to my bug report confirming, much to my disappointment, that the new behaviour was intentional and not to be fixed.

Well, today I am glad to report that Sven-S. Porst was able to refer me to a post on Mac Daddy World describing a hidden preference setting that enables you to restore the previous behaviour.

Since it’s a hidden preference, it’s only accessible via the Terminal, but it’s just a single line of code:

defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO

Voilà! It sort of confirms that at least some people at Apple are not entirely sure that the new behaviour is such a good idea, regardless of what the Bug Reporter staff says.

Of course, there is no guarantee that future versions of Mail will continue to support this hidden setting, but for now, Snow Leopard users like me can breathe a sigh of relief and once again enjoy the use of the “Copy Address” command as a command for copying the e-mail address only, which makes much more sense when managing e-mail addresses in Address Book.

So thanks to Mac Daddy World and to Sven-S. Porst!

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.