How to Change the Quote Attribution Line in the Mac’s Mail.app Mail Program   - 3,856 Views, 2 Comments

If you are anything like me, you quickly got tired of having to delete the “On such-and-such a date, so-and-so wrote:” attribution quote line every ..single ..time ..you replied to an email in Mac’s native mail program, Mail.app.

Oddly, given how friendly the Mac generally is, there is no way to alter, edit, or eradicate that infernal line through preferences. Or, really, through any other obvious way.

And that’s because the way to edit it or get rid of it is inobvious. But it’s not impossible. And it’s not hard.

Here is what you have to do to change or get rid of the attribution line in your email replies:

1. Open a terminal window

2. cd into this directory:

/System/Library/Frameworks/Message.framework/Versions/B/Resources/English.lproj/

3. Make a backup of the file called “Delayed.strings”. I do it by doing a “cp Delayed.strings Delayed.strings.bak”

4. Edit the Delayed.strings file. You will have to do this with vi, and you will have to do it either as root, or doing a ’sudo’.

5. Find this line:

“REPLY_ATTRIBUTION” = “On %1$@, at %2$@, %3$@ wrote:nn”;

..and change it as you please.

%1$@ is the date variable.

%2$@ is the time variable.

%3$@ is the username variable.

Personally, I removed all the text (but not the line), thus eradicating that pesky attribution line altogether. So now in my Delayed.strings file, this line looks like this:

“REPLY_ATTRIBUTION” = “”;

6. Save the file.

In order for your changes to take effect, you will need to restart your computer.