How to make a clipping of an email address

Question

Hello...
My situation is that I'm in the middle of a job search, and I'm registering all over the place, and everyone wants my email address -- in fact some use it for my "user name" -- and so (for security etc.) I set up a couple of new mailboxes (which I can then simply dump once I land a gig). And I'm getting tired of typing in the whole address all the time, so I thought I'd make a couple of text clippings of my addresses and just drag the appropriate one into the "user name" box as needed. (Yes, I know I can do this in Text Substitution sysprefs, but I'm a mouse-oriented kind of guy, I use key commands relatively rarely; think of this question as an academic exercise.)
The first thing I tried was what I do whenever I want to make a clipping: I highlighted my address in a document and dragged it to my desktop. When I try that, however, instead of a clipping, I get a .mailtoloc document. If I then change the extension to .textclipping, I get an useable clip, but the contents of the clip include "mailto:" appended to my address ( e+.+g., "mailto:[email protected]"). And that's where I'm stuck. I can't find how to edit out the "mailto:" yet keep it a clip. If I open it with TextEdit I see a bunch of html code; if I edit that down, and save it as a .textclipping, the resulting clip itself is empty ("Clipping contents: unknown"); if I open it with TextWrangler it opens a Mail message (which is annoying).
So that's what I want to do, I want to make a standard text clipping, the contents of which are a standard email address -- without "mailto:". It would seem the simplest way would be to edit that string, if I could find it. I am competent and confident using Terminal and other system-level tools, and have Developer Tools installed. (If this were still pre-X, at this point I'd whip out my copy of ResEdit and start looking for a 'STR ' resource. Alas, I did not keep up.)
TIA,
Jeff

Answer 1

Good suggestion. It gets rid of the "mailto:", but I have to remove the space after dragging the clip into the user name box. Interestingly, I can open the clip with TextWrangler, remove the space, and save it as a clip. However, the clip, as a clip, still has the space! When I open it again in TextWrangler, the space is gone, but still appears when I drag the clip or open it in the Finder. So not quite a cigar. But definitely useful.
So the question remains, where is a clip's data stored? Is it editable? If so, how? If not, why not?