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How Mail sucks (again), TUAW-style

A few days ago, the co-creator of MacZealots posted an interesting piece on how Mail.app (and all the other OS X email clients) suck.

Today, TUAW takes the plunge in a different way, asking readers to say what they think is wrong with Apple Mail and what they would like to see fixed. The author of the post, David Chartier, doesn’t much care for third-party “plugins and add-ons and widgets and gidgets” which are never as good, he suggests, as the code written by the guys who wrote the app itself.

Nonetheless, as a small public service, here is the third-party answer to some of the gripes people have posted on TUAW. You might like to read the TUAW article. It’s interesting to see what bugs other people.

Some of those things only Apple can fix. But some can be fixed with plug-ins and gidgets. You will find some solutions, by comment number, after the jump.


3, 20. Greater HTML control. MailPictures enables the entry of raw HTML into your emails. Granted, the end results of WebKit‘s HTML rendering are unusual, but it can be done.

5. Selective IMAP folder subscriptions with Cyrus server software. Some suggestions here on MacInTouch.

7. Autoreplies. You can set these up with MailResponder or with an AppleScript like Vacation Script.

9. Roll your own (more sensible) keyboard shortcuts. A number of utilities exist that can specify particular shortcut keys, either at a global level or for a particular app. Check out Spark or QuicKeys. Or change them in Keyboard and Mouse pane of System Preferences.

10, 13, 14. Better integration with iCal. Mail2iCal, Mail2iCalToDo, iCalMail, and Fuhgeddaboutit all offer tighter integration through AppleScript. With FastScripts these scripts are only a keyboard shortcut away.

I don’t care for it myself, but CRM4Mac also offers interface integration, bringing iCal, Mail and Address Book together in one window.

13. Disabling attachment preview. Use Mail Attachments Iconizer.

And on the Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on Page you will find many more solutions to problems you never even knew you had!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 26th October, 2005 at 6:57 am and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Plug-ins, Apple Mail Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “How Mail sucks (again), TUAW-style”

  1. burton hollifield says:
    October 31st, 2005 at 1:12 pm

    I posted the cyrus beef on TUAW. Thanks for the pointer.

    I am a bit puzzled that apple would have an application with the problem I mentioned. No other mail client I have played on my mac (t-bird, entourage, pine, mulberry) has that problem out of the box. Mail worked last year, and then just stopped.

    thanks again and great site.

  2. Tim says:
    October 31st, 2005 at 1:24 pm

    It does seems an oversight to say the least.

    Perhaps it is supposed to encourage you to use a .Mac account (which always seems to work flawlessly) ;-)

    But did either of those tips work for you? Either setting the “altnamespace” option if you have that kind of access or setting up a “dummy” account?

  3. burton hollifield says:
    October 31st, 2005 at 1:41 pm

    Nope. Don’t have that access, and the dummy account one was a little unclear. I tried adding a new account to “mail” (I assume that is what it means) and the interface would not take a new imap from the same server. But maybe after some sleep, I will understand it better.

  4. Tim says:
    October 31st, 2005 at 3:05 pm

    That’s harsh. I’m a techie either, I’m afraid. Hunting around the web, there doesn’t seem to be a wide-shared set of instructions on how to set up Apple Mail for Cyrus.

    I assume that you have done the usual things, like fiddle around with the IMAP path in the Advanced section of the account settings, putting in INBOX for example to see if that sorts it. And that you have asked the sysadmins who run the server what they recommend.

    Indiana University uses Cyrus and they have a howto for mail.app:

    http://kb.iu.edu/data/ajnm.html

    Any joy there?

    Bruno Rodgrigues who is no idiot and runs the Litux Blog reckons:

    The trick with Apple Mail is to set the prefix before the first access to the IMAP account. You?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll need to delete your current account, create a new one with an invalid password so that it doesn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t connect, then go to advanced and set ?¢‚Ǩ?ìINBOX?¢‚Ǩ¬ù as prefix (no dot in the end). Now you can set the correct password and let Apple Mail go online.

    Then you should go to the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìMailbox behaviours?¢‚Ǩ¬ù tab and disable all checkboxes. Then you click on each existing folder and use the menu Mailbox->Use Mailbox For, for each folder: Sent, Junk, Trash and Drafts.

    This way Apple Mail should work.

  5. burton hollifield says:
    November 1st, 2005 at 12:59 am

    Bruno Rodrigues’ almost idea seemed to work so far.

    Thanks again.

  6. burton hollifield says:
    November 1st, 2005 at 1:00 am

    Sorry for the bad english. Seem to work, at least so far… (I like you slow down cowboy note, too)

  7. Tim says:
    November 1st, 2005 at 1:24 am

    Excellent!

    I hope it’s a permanent fix.

  8. Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » 20061114How Mail sux and (.Mac webmail too) says:
    November 14th, 2006 at 7:36 pm

    [...] Last year (26 October 2005) it was What’s wrong with Apple Mail and how it needs to be fixed. Twenty TUAW got into the spirit of things and listed their gripes which were interesting to read. [...]

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