Here is the first of an email interview series with developers, bloggers and others on Apple Mail and how they use it…..

Scott Morrison has an M. A. in Educational Technology and teaches Computer Sciences at a high school in Montreal. In the evenings, he tries to transform himself into a developer of Mail plug-ins.

His first Mac was the original Mac 128k in 1984, and he has been a die hard Mac user since. His current rig includes a Powerbook G4 -500 and an iMac intel duo-Core 1.83. He loves a good scotch and in his other spare time makes beer and mead.

Mail Act-On and MailTags are his first forays into Cocoa/Objective C programming (and probably the most ambitious and widely-used of all the Mail.app plugins).

HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?

SM: Off and on since OS 10.0, but exclusively since January 2005. I’ve used Entourage which I found slow (Office 2001) and too “Microsofty”, and Thunderbird, which was a great client, but a little buggy in bits and not fully integrated in to the OS X environment (such as Spotlight and addressbook).

I made the switch back to Mail because I was looking forward to using Spotlight and Smart Mailfolders. Once I started developing plug-ins, I kept eating my own dog food. I also use First Class Client but that is only for work.

HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?

SM: Mail Act-On and MailTags, but would you expect me to say any different?

I generally avoid notification plug-ins because all a notification seem to do is bring me more work — I am of the GTD mind that I should check my email once an hour, or manually when I have time to do so. I don’t need any more interruptions :)

HW: What’s your favourite thing about Mail.app?

SM: Spotlight and Smart Mailboxes, (oh, and MailTags :)

HW: What’s your pet hate about Mail.app?

SM:

1. The fact that it has to load in the whole attachment before displaying a message. If I have a 35 MB zipped attachment, Mail insists on loading it in — Why can’t it just tell me that there is an attachment and be done with it. — ie after the initial receive, store the attachment in a cache somewhere, strip it out of the body of the message and leave a link or something that refers to the attachment so that subsequent requests for the message doesn’t force Mail to grind to a halt as it loads the attachment into memory.
2. It NEVER remembers that I want to have “MailBox” as a column in my list view — When I am looking at a Smart Mailbox and the email messages are coming from any one of 80 different folders, it would be nice if I turn on mailbox column, it could remember that I like it on.
3. Allow me to reorder my mail folders! I can do it with the smart mailboxes, why not regular mail folders?

HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?

SM: Publish some documentation of the API so that it is easier to write plug-ins. (Or better yet, open source the whole app — it is not like it is a big money maker for Apple.)

Write the message.framework so that is more of a standard for dealing with email that any front-end application can patch into (like WebKit). Right now, message.framework is very tied in to Mail and vice versa. It would be great if other applications could easily patch into the email database for retrieving/linking to messages in the same way that other apps can patch into iPhoto, iTunes, etc databases. (Apps such as Process, omni-outliner, etc)

And really, things like Mail Act-On should be built in. Not that I am asking for Apple to make my software obsolete. But really, it should be included.

Tags: Apple Mail, dislikes, likes, mail.app, plugins, scott morrison, talking mail.app

Related posts

• “Talking Mail.app” series wrap up
• Talking Mail.app: Rui Carmo
• Talking Mail.app: Rob Griffiths
• Talking Mail.app: Pierre Igot
• Talking Mail.app: Peter Maurer

This entry was posted on Thursday, 9th February, 2006 at 9:54 am and is filed under Apple Mail. 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.