Jump to content

How to "Fix" the "Copy Address" Feature in Mac OS X's Mail Client

+ 2
  msilver's Photo
Posted May 03 2011 04:13 PM

If you're using Mac OS X 10.6, you may notice that when you right-click (or ctrl+click) on an address in Mail.app, and choose the "copy address" item from the contextual menu, when you paste that address somewhere else, the address shows up like

Matt Silver <msilver@gmail.com>


Which is fine, but if you save addresses to plain text often, and don't want to have both the email address and the name, you can fix it to behave like the Mail application did in Mac OS X 10.5.

  • Quit Mail (command+q)
  • Open up the Terminal application from /Applications/Utilities
  • Paste the following line into the terminal window and press "Return"
    defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -boolean No

  • Quit the Terminal application and open Mail again.


When you go to copy and paste an address, just the address should show up like this:

msilver@gmail.com


I found this from a few other blogs when trying to help an employee at work, but also discovered http://secrets.blacktree.com/ which has a WHOLE bunch of defaults you can change in a similar fashion.

Tags:
2 Subscribe


4 Replies

+ 1
  gonzopancho's Photo
Posted May 08 2011 08:11 PM

This needs to be "AddressIncludeNameOnPasteboard", rather than "AddressIncludeNameonpasteboard".

To fix:

macbook:~ jim$ defaults delete com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameonpasteboard
macbook:~ jim$ defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -boolean No
 : May 08 2011 08:36 PM
Weird. When I edit it I see that it's capitalized properly in the editor window. But it still shows up lower-case in the article. Listen to Gonzo, though. He's right.
 : May 09 2011 12:17 AM
was capitalized properly after I posted. now, it's not.

all of mine have been randomly lower-cased as well.

don't listen to me.
 : May 09 2011 08:29 AM
The lowercase issue has been fixed - thanks for catching that!