Talking Mail.app: Andreas Amann
Andreas has a Ph.D. in physics and works for a small company in San Diego, CA which develops measurement instrumentation mostly for research.
Despite having no formal programming training he keeps his few skills up to date by writing some software on the side, like the very excellent Mail Scripts 
and Eudora Mailbox Cleaner
HW: What kind of Mac do you use?
AA: My personal Macs have always been portable (5300c 100MHz, 3400c 200MHz, G3 “Lombard” 333MHz - all of which don’t exist any longer, TiBook 550MHz - fulfilling its duties as my personal server despite it broken screen hinge - and currently an AlBook 1.5GHz). My first encounter with a Mac was a Mac 128k I had to write a program for during my university days.
HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?
AA: I switched to Mail.app in January 2002 (I guess that would have been OS X 10.1). Before that I used Eudora (starting with some version 1.x or 2.x back in about 1992). After Eudora more than once mangled mailboxes beyond repair I decided to ditch it.
Apart from that I am using Thunderbird on my PC at work (after ditching Outlook once I realized how bad it did with IMAP accounts).
HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?
Mail Scripts (of course!)
JunkMatcher (can’t live without it)
MailActOn (for adding the occasional missing keyboard shortcut)
MailEnhancer (since I file most of my incoming messages into various mailboxes, I rarely have unread messages in the InBox)
GrowlMail
GPGMail (just so that I can open/read the occasional message)
HW: What’s your favourite thing about Mail.app?
AA: The integration with the system (Address Book, recently iPhoto for attached images) as well as the single-window user interface (especially coming from Eudora which leaves windows all over the place). The interface does make sense to me and with the advent of smart mailboxes I can deal with all my unread messages in a single place.
HW: What’s your pet hate about Mail.app?
AA: Bugs! especially the ones I reported late 2002 which are still listed as “Open” in Apple’s Bug Reporter:
rdar://3134276, rdar://3485580, rdar://3572182, rdar://3981637, rdar://4126790, rdar://4321591, rdar://4358766, rdar://4374984 (I am aware that these links don’t work for anyone but Apple employees but thought it might be useful to add them here nevertheless).
Most of them (not surprisingly :-) relate to Mail’s AppleScript interface which has some serious bugs. Things seem to randomly break with new versions (faster than old problems get fixed) which can be extremely frustrating.
My second peeve (can I get another one? ;-) is the fact that Mail seems to have some issues updating correctly when dealing with IMAP mailboxes - incoming messages filtered into IMAP mailboxes by rules at times show up twice in the mailbox (until the mailbox is rebuild again - oh, BTW: can we get an AppleScript interface for “rebuild mailbox”?) and read messages in IMAP mailboxes sometimes randomly get marked as unread again ( see the Apple Mail Discussions thread).
HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?
AA: Get around to fixing the bugs which have been open across three major versions and finally add proper import/export of messages from/to other mail clients (both Eudora and Thunderbird which probably account for the largest amount of non-Mail users don’t work right or not at all).
Also, listen to customer feedback (Apple Discussions and what people ask at the Genius Bar) what the most requested features are. Looking at the number of plug-ins I have installed on my system to make Mail work the way I want tells me that there are a lot of things missing…
Oh, you said only one thing? :-)
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You can read other interviews with developers and Mac identities talking about their Mail.app experiences by following this tag cloud link.
Tags: andreas amann, Apple Mail, applescript, dislikes, likes, mail.app, talking mail.appRelated posts