Old man yells at the state of email addresses
It is the Year of our Lord 2026, and today I am assembling an email list by cutting and pasting into a spreadsheet before cutting and pasting that into Apple Mail.
Why am I doing such a straightforward task in such a roundabout way? Gosh, I’m glad you asked.
So, I imported my email contacts n years ago into OSX Contacts, and it behaves reasonably well. But, all the emails I need are not all in my Contact list, and people don’t always update their publicly accessible details, so I’m having to go on a Web Page Hunt for emails. Sounds easy? No.
Many years ago, people put their email addresses on web pages, personal or departmental. But then came along SPAM email lists, built from bots scraping valid email addresses across the web. In an ever escalating war, email addresses were scrambled and obfuscated with different methods, some using clever highlight and paste tricks tied to the web browser. If I try to paste directly into Apple Mail, I sometimes get scrambled garbage.
So, I now post that into a blank cell in a spreadsheet and that action mostly strips away some of the tricks to reveal a valid email. I say ‘valid’ and not ‘correct’ because people move jobs and they don’t update/delete old emails. In some cases, I later find out that the email is several years out of date and it bounces several minutes/hours/days later, or maybe silently disappears. Who knows? No forwarding address, so I guess I stop there.
But never mind! I keep my ascii list as deposited in the spreadsheet. But when I drag and drop emails from my Contacts/Mail into the Excel spreadsheet, sometimes the dotted box indicating the current highlighted cell is offset vertically by half a cell - so I have to guess if I will get the email address in the same row as the full name of the contact. Why is it doing this? Who knows! It’s all a journey of discovery and excitement here on my computer. Also: I’m discovering all sorts of unexpected behaviour, for example:
There’s a standard for email addresses - usually they format as:
Full Name <email@university.blah.edu>
… and this works as it should with drag and drop. But if you have a comma such that it says:
Name, Full <email@university.blah.edu>
… then Apple Mail treats Name as a separate email address!
The final Chef’s kiss is that after I assembled the list in Apple Mail, I pressed some key combo and all 50-ish emails disappeared from the “To:” line. And apple-Z didn’t bring them back. So I had to type them in manually all again, but this time I first put them in a spreadsheet, checked their validity, highlighted them and pasted back into Apple Mail.
I know I’m shouting at the sea, but there’s a reason why I get panic attacks composing bulk emails - the process is far more challenging than it should be. And I know, I know… I should be grateful that ANY of this works at all, truly it is amazing, but every so often it turns and kicks my arse, hard.
I am then reminded why I am so happy keeping as much of my workflow in flat text ascii files and use org-mode for managing my professional life. It is shiny? No. Is is perfect? Also, no. But at least when all else fails, the text doesn’t change in front of my eyes and I can grep away.
