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Curious pasting in Mail.app

I just discovered something curious. I accidentally pasted when I meant to undo in Apple Mail, and it took the text on the clipboard and created a new mail message with the clipboard text as its contents. Not a new message ready to send, like if I had dragged the text to Mail’s icon, but a new unread message in my mailbox that had the text as its body and no headers.

“That’s strange,” I thought, so I pasted again, into TextEdit, to see if I’d somehow copied a mail message or something - no, just text. I then added a Subject: and From: header line, copied and pasted again. The same thing, only this time with those headers. It only seems to work with plain text pasteboard contents, and I couldn’t get it to work reliably in every kind of mail folder, but a local mailbox seems to work most consistently.

I feel like I’ve found Mail’s vestigial tail - this is mostly harmless behavior, but a little confusing, and I can’t really think of any use for it. I’m curious how it got in there.

Previously:
What’s hot in CS
February 5, 2006

Today, a group of graduating PhD students in our department met up to brief each other on what’s new and hot in their respective fields, to remind each other of what’s going on outside their respective specialties. The idea is that when interviewing for jobs, you have to hold up your end of a conversation [...]

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Talk: Bart Miller and Dyninst
February 3, 2006

In a recent largescale systems seminar*, we had Bart Miller from Wisconsin talk about some of the upcoming work on DynInst. DynInst is an API for runtime code patching, which lets you do things like attach to a running program and insert your own code around every network call, or replace procedures with your own [...]

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State of the Union
February 1, 2006

I completely missed this year’s State of the Union address, but was pleased to see this quote from the speech:

First, I propose to double the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years. This funding will support the work of America’s most creative [...]

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