Unable to remove quotes from messages in Mail.app

Mail.app will generally indent previous messages and place a colored line to the left of the previous message if they are commented. Some users, however, are finding that they cannot edit these messages to get rid of the line indent.

Apple Discussions poster outrigger writes:

"Is there any easy way to remove the blue vertical lines in emails that contain embedded photo's etc? I try to send "clean" emails, but I can't seem to find a way to get rid of them."

Users can usually change or decrease the indent level by selecting the text and then going to the "Format" menu and selecting "Decrease" from the "Quote Level" submenu. While this should work for most situations, there are some instances where users simply cannot remove the quote level in emails, and as such are left with the vertical line. This has to do with Mail's incompatibility with the quote level methods used by some email applications.

The standard is for email applications to use a number of ">" characters before each line to indicate the quote level for that line, but in some cases there may be some text encoding incompatibilities that keep Mail from recognizing these characters for removal. In addition, one quoting technique that is not supported by Mail's "Quote Level" funciton, is when quoted elements are surrounded by the "content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable" tag which is embedded in the mail's "raw" code. When text is surrounded by this tag, Mail will not be able to remove the quote with the "Decrease Quote Level" function.

There is nothing users can do to get rid of the embedded quote, and while users can see the raw source of the original message as it was received, users cannot edit this source even when they generate a new message containing it. As such, there are only two ways to remove the embedded quote level.

Fixes

Convert messages to plain text When forwarding or replying to messages containing these quotes, users can get rid of them by converting the message to plain text. To do this, go to the "Format" menu and choose "Make Plain Text", or press opt-cmd-T. Unfortunately this will remove all formatting of the previous message, but if users press the key command again to revert the message back to rich text, then they can manually format the text again.

Copy the quoted text to a new message In order to preserve formatting, users can select the quoted material and copy it to a new message instead of using the reply or forward options. While users may want to select all the text in the original message, doing this will also select the quote tags. Therefore, to avoid the tags its best to go to the bottom of the message and select all the text up to the very first character in the quote, but not the full quote, as shown in the following screenshot:

Then copy the text and paste it to a new message, and the original formatting of the text will be preserved, without the annoying quote line.

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