Tips For Quoting Messages in Mac Mail

When replying to an email message you can quote all or a part of the previous message in your reply. Learn how to only quote portions instead, and many other tips to make your replies better.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for quoting email messages and replies in the Mac Mail App. 
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While responding to an email message it is often useful to quote a portion of the original message and then you can respond directly to what the other person asked.  For instance, if I got a message like this I can click the reply button here and you may notice that everything gets put in as part of quoted text. Now you can respond here at the top and then having the quoted text in there gives the recipient a reminder of what they originally sent you. Now you have controls for how this works. 
You go to Mail and then Settings and then go to Composing. There is a section here for Responding. One of the options is, Quote the text of the original message. If you turn that Off and respond to a message like this you can see none of it gets quoted. If you turn it On then you've got the option here to, Increase the quote level, so in other words if there is already some quoted text in there that will go up by one level. We will look at Levels here in a minute. Also you have the option to, Include all the text of the original message which is what we saw, or if text is selected that Only Incude the Selected Text. Otherwise include all the text. So with that option On instead of including all of this long message here in the response I could simply pick the one part that I'm responding to. Select that and then hit Reply. Now you can see that is the only portion that is there in the response. 
Now you also have the ability to Increase or Decrease the Quote Level. So, in this case, this is quote level 1 with just one line here to the left. But if I were to select it and then go to Format and then Quote Level you can see increase is Command and then the Quote Key, Decrease is the same thing but with the Option Key added. So I can increase and you can see now it is up by 2 levels. So this could be really handy, say, if you were to type or paste some text in there and want it quoted. 
So, for instance, I start with a blank message here. I can have something I want quoted. Maybe this is something I've copied and pasted from a text message or some other email message. I can select that and I can use Command and Quote and you can see how it puts that as one level of quoting. I can go more levels as well or decrease using the Option Key. 
But there is another way to paste in text and have it quoted. So let's say I'm responding to this message here. I respond and I only have that part selected. Sometimes it is a good idea to respond underneath the questions. So it can kind of be read as a conversation. So you type something here. Then if you want to put something from say another source or message, like I'll go to this message here and I will Copy this. Then I'll go back to this message here and I'll Paste it in. But it is not quoted there. So I could use that increase quote level to do that. Also, I could have used Edit and then Paste As Quotation. Shift Command V. When you do that you can see it is pasted as a quotation. That's really handy when you're  not responding to a single message but somebody has maybe sent you multiple messages and you want to kind of Copy and Paste a reply to all of them together. 
Now I showed how I responded here below the quote and it's a good idea to have it read properly. But also don't be afraid to edit other things. Like I'll get of these two lines here, a blank line right there, maybe I'll even get rid of some of the information there like maybe the date isn't important and the email address isn't important. I just want to do it like that. You can also get rid of portions. So you can, you know, get rid of something or maybe do it properly with, say, some dots in there like that to show that something has been removed. The idea here is to shorten this as much as possible. Chances are the person you're replying to is the person you're quoting. They already know what they said. So it is just important to show them enough so that they can then read your response to it. Don't make them read through all of their text. When you have a long message like this but you want to respond to a couple of things, select the portion that contains all those things, Reply and then you can go and kind of Edit this down, maybe get rid of some of the stuff here. Just add some lines in there just to have the portions that you want to respond to. Then you can add your responses in here and make it nice and neat. It's just polite and good etiquette to give the person you're responding to something nice and neat so they can easily read your response. 
Note another thing you can do is just because that this is quoted text doesn't mean you can't style it. So, if you wanted to Bold a word you can select it and then select Bold. Or change its color if you want. So this could really help point things out. If you want to include all of this but make sure that they understand that what you're responding to is this part you can point that out in many ways.
Now notice when I respond to this that my signature here is at the bottom. I like doing it that way but you actually have two options. In Mail, Settings you go to Signature. There's an option at the bottom here, Replace Signature Above Quoted Text. Obviously having that turned Off places it below. If you do that and you respond then you get this. I'm not a fan of that because when you're responding up here and then the reply is all the way after the signature it is sometimes hard for the other person to see exactly what it is you're responding to. 
Now while so far we've been talking about text quoting there's kind of the same thing for images. If you respond here you can see that the image is no longer there. That's unfortunate if you want it to be part of the response. So you can change that by going to Edit and then Include Attachments with Replies. You can have it Always, Never, Only When Adding Recipients, or Ask. So putting it on Ask means that if I respond here it says, Include Attachments. I'll include them in this case and you can see there the image is actually included and it's quoted. You can see it is put up a Level right here. 
Now while you can Edit text here to make it more concise or to make something Bold or whatever, can you do the same with images? Yes you can because if you select an image, if you look at the upper right, you have the option to Mark It Up. So you can now draw on it, I'll just add a little arrow right here, and change its color and Done. Now without creating a whole other file and editing it then reattaching it you've actually just edited the image that is going to be in the response. 
So I hope you found this useful. At the very least use the selection technique to only quote the part of the message that really needs to be quoted in your reply. 
Thanks for watching.

Comments: One Response to “Tips For Quoting Messages in Mac Mail”

Bern Shanfield

12 months ago

Hadn't noticed the always include attachment option. That's good as it saves hunting for attachments within email threads and also allows archiving just the last email in that thread, which then includes the entirety of the thread. I'm not sure of the "internet cost" in bandwidth, energy, etc. I'd guess it is minimal for small attachments and goes up with the size of the attachment and the number of trips the email makes. I'd guess it could be big if the distribution list is big.

Tips For Quoting Messages in Mac Mail

Comments: One Response to “Tips For Quoting Messages in Mac Mail”

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