What is that ugly black boarder in Mac MAIL when replying?

R

RonaldMacDonald

Registered
When I reply to a message in OS 10.5.7, there is this black frame around the message of the original sender that has an "X" in the upper left corner.

I find that it gets in the way when trying to type between the lines when responding. Can anyone tell me how to get rid of it. I like the old way better.
 
Are you referring to the quote indicator line, which is along the left side of a quoted email?
You can change how the quote levels are displayed in your Mail Preferences.

If that's not it, can you provide a screen shot?
 
I will attach the screenshot. It only happens when I try to enter the body text of the person who sends me the mail. But it does not happen with mail from everyone.
 

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That's to allow you to delete the body of the message by clicking on the x to keep from sending the message back to the originator when replying to the message. I find it very useful myself--YMMV.
Ralph
 
Yes. Stupidly, they've removed the old way, where you could, for example, divide the quote into several parts so that you could reply to each paragraph of the original message.
 
I have been talking with Apple Japan about this problem and I even showed them this post. They are very interested in knowing if anyone else has this problem. Based on what fryke posted, it would appear that I am not the only one to notice this and find it inconvenient. Especially the part about not being able to divide the message.

DeltaMac mentioned that it happens when replying to a message with an attachemnt but I later found this is not always the case. It seems to happen for emails from some people but not from others, which tells me this may not be normal. Apple Japan seems to agree.

So if you are experiencing this, please let us know as Apple seems to be interested in this issue.
 
Seems to happen only for HTML E-Mails, a quick test suggests. Or at least it does in HTML E-Mails and not in RTF and Plain Text E-Mails in a quick test. I guess that means you'd have to copy the text to TextEdit and paste it into the reply in order to have some control over it... Seems like HTML mail is handled as a single object in a reply/forward situation. Bad.
 
I have this same problem, and I find it very annoying because I often get messages from people with point-by-point changes to projects that I have to address one-by-one. To keep Mac Mail from jumping my cursor to the bottom of the message I have to place the cursor where i want to start typing, and decrease the quote level on that line. It's a pain--I used to just be able to click and type. Being able to delete the whole message at once is not that useful to me--mostly, I need to keep the original message in there so the client knows what I'm replying to.
 
Could it be that the messages received that exhibit the black border symptom come from only clients using Microsoft Outlook, or Microsoft Outlook in conjunction with a Microsoft Exchange server?

Outlook/Exchange has a funky way of dealing with messages, sometimes treating them more like attachments and/or objects than blocks of text (for example, the "winmail.dat" file that is actually an email that Mac users have to deal with sometimes).
 
I find this black frame quite cumbersome too. I'm surprised there's no way to parameter it off, just like those "levels of citation" you can't take off incoming mails before transferring them. Efficient but over simple software (mail 3.6). Thanks for tipping the newbie if somebody finds this post.
 
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