Quotations in mail

[Aussie]

Homage to the helpful ones..... I have managed to do an email using (paste as) quotations from an email to which i wished to respond but it was bit frustrating due to the fact of the same quote coming up again and again until i clicked Copy first before using paste as quotation... however what about when you work on the same(received) email ( i.e not opening a new one) and using a method of highlighting the pieces you want to keep, deleting the unwanted and inserting your own responses to the highlighted text? I looked up Help and it said to highlight the chosen text before clicking "reply" and only the highlighted text would show up.. this is what happened alright but you can only highlight one uninterrupted piece not several individually selected pieces of text at the same time and also the highlighted text shows up in the same colour as the rest of the typing whereas in Paste as Quotation there are different colours which clearly shows it as a quote. So just checking with you this is normal? At times it would be easier to be able to use the one email rather than go between a new one and the one being responded to.
Incase i messed it up i sent a copy of the original email to a special mailbox, i saw it there but when i had finished replying using the quotes the copy had disappeared. i know its weird but it isn't in trash and the action of "send copy to...." was confirmed when i checked the status of the original message and it showed "send copy to Spare again"... tends to confirm the action was taken in the first place. Just something i don't understand. Thanks.