Talking Mail.app: John Gruber
John Gruber is the author of Daring Fireball. His primary computer is a 15-inch PowerBook G4 named Joker.
HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?
JG: I’ve only been using Mail regularly since early September 2005, when we began eating our own dog food and switched our mail server at Joyent 
(the company I work for) to our own product, which supports IMAP but not POP.
I use Mail only to access my Joyent email account. I use Mailsmith to access all my other email, and have used it since version 1.0 in 1998. I’d still be using Mailsmith for my Joyent email if it weren’t for the fact that Mailsmith only supports POP.
(To be clear: I wholeheartedly endorse our decision at Joyent to only support IMAP clients.)
Also, you don’t want to get me started on calling Apple Mail “Mail.app”.
HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?
JG: None.
HW: What’s your favourite thing about Apple Mail?
JG: The way it allows you to paste images inline within plain text messages.
HW: What’s your pet hate about Apple Mail?
JG: When it comes to writing, its mail composition environment is clumsy and primitive.
HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?
JG: That the way Mail attempts to handle quoted passages in replies (in plain text messages) is cute if you want to be a top-poster who quotes the entire message you’re replying to, but frustrating and annoying if you want to do the right 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: Apple Mail, dislikes, john gruber, likes, mail.app, Mailsmith, talking mail.appRelated posts
February 16th, 2006 at 5:32 am
Notice a trend in these interviews? No one really loves Mail. Silly application.
February 16th, 2006 at 5:33 am
Mail is a heck of a lot less primitive than at least one mail client I could name but won’t.
Why does it have quote bars?
Simple. Mail, like any up-to-date mail client, implements format=flowed, as per RFC2646 - and so I should hope:
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2646.txt
Here is further explanation from accessibility expert Joe Clark:
http://www.joeclark.org/ffaq.html
And hence quote-bars are used, as they are by most clients that support that standard for the following reason:
http://www.eudora.com/techsupport/kb/1625hq.html
February 16th, 2006 at 6:27 am
Hey! I love Mail! I’ve been using it since the public beta days (and I still have emails on my system from then), and while it’s not perfect, I find it’s the best overall option out there. I use Entourage at work (to connect to our Exchange server), but I can’t bring myself to use it for my personal email.
My biggest beefs with mail are the lack of ability to compose HTML emails, lack of formatting options (it’s gotten better with 10.4 but still not where it needs to be), better Exchange functionality (beyond IMAP) and the need for better SPAM/Junk mail protection.
Still it’s better than anything out there I’ve tried in just about any price range.
February 16th, 2006 at 7:55 am
I like Mail. It has its quirks, but on the whole it makes email handling clean, easy and unobtrusive. Entourage on the other hand…
February 16th, 2006 at 8:21 am
I love Mail too! :-)
What impresses me most in this series of interviews is the balance of likes and dislikes.
There is none of that “my country / email client / OS right or wrong” partisan barracking nonsense.
Instead, a theme of critical appreciation runs through the interviews, an ability to love Mail’s strengths without being blind to its weakensses.
Pierre Igot’s interview is an excellent and thoughtful extended example, but it is in all of them.
Hats off to them all, I say. If only this kind of “critical love” existed elsewhere in the world as well!
February 16th, 2006 at 8:41 am
I like Mail too - it’s not overkill, is fairly simple, and gets the job done.
That said, it has it’s quirks, and I posted a movie on my site about how I can get it to crash reliably every time:
Check it out here …
(No one else I’ve talked to has been able to make it crash the same way, however.)
:-)
February 16th, 2006 at 9:21 am
I love Mail as well. It’s vastly superior to every other client I’ve used.
The peeves are limited HTML mail. If you are going to do styled text as HTML why not include indenting via the blockquote tag? I mean really. Also there need to be more streamlined controls for fonts, colors and so forth. Yes you can use the floating window or the menus. But there’s a reason why most application have icon bars.
One thing I dislike is some oddity between Mail and Outlook where you sometimes get lines that never wrap. You end up having to hit reply so as to generate a new email where you can read the message.
I also ought say that I love the way Apple handles quote characters.
February 16th, 2006 at 9:34 am
I was speaking more from a geek/power user standpoint. Just from reading these articles a few trends are obvious:
1. They don’t use Mail and what they use they aren’t really happy with.
2. They use Mail, but they aren’t really happy with it for one reason or another.
I’m not saying that Mail sucks. It sucks no more than any other e-mail application presnently on OS X. All I am saying is that it’s by no means the “holy grail” of e-mail clients. That does not presently exist on the Mac.
February 16th, 2006 at 9:38 am
I like Mail.app (sorry John “Apple Mail” is even more unwieldy.) It does everything I need. Filtering and running AppleScripts for filtering or on the results of a filter is very powerful. I don’t have an inconsequential amount of mail either. I have something like 50,000 emails going back decades. Which leads to the real winner for Mail.app, Spotlight search. It works very well. I used Mailsmith for years but it couldn’t compare.
February 16th, 2006 at 9:40 am
clark - thanks for reminding me about that annoyance.
Overall, out of all the Mac OS X email clients I’ve tried (Entourage, Gyaz Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora), Mail is the best. Matter of fact, out of all the email clients I’ve used on Windows, Mail is still the best.
February 16th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Justin said:
Sure. But geeks and power users are never going to be satisified, are they? It is in the nature of “geekhoodness” to be unhappy with apps however good they are. (Some my best friends are geeks and that’s what they tell me.)
Amen to that!
Although I hear that the Mail team is currently looking to hire people to make the holy grail.
February 16th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
My pet peeves about Apple Mail are mostly technical. The “error on this account” icons don’t show up half the time. The timeout on outgoing mail is absurdly long. The note in the “try another SMTP server” dialog about the selection sticking till a relaunch is a complete and utter lie.
February 16th, 2006 at 8:40 pm
“The peeves are limited HTML mail”
Command + I
I don’t use HTML email myself, because I prefer plaintext, but HTML is hardly a problem. In Thunderbird you have a facility to enter tags directly, of course. However, in Mail you can write your HTML in a text editor, display it in Safari and then hit Command + I.
Mail has it’s annoyances - the grossly dumbed-down GUI with its lack of feedback being one - but not being able send HTML email with it is *not* one of them.
February 16th, 2006 at 10:07 pm
Mike: thanks for pointing out the format=flowed reason for the the quotation bars.
Makes sense to me now.
February 16th, 2006 at 10:39 pm
JG, you don’t use any plugins or extensions? I thought you were an ardent SpamSieve user.
February 17th, 2006 at 2:53 am
I love mail. Nice and fast and simple.
February 17th, 2006 at 7:55 am
Mike, no offense, but having to write pure HTML in a text editor, open it in Safari and then put it in certainly is an annoyance when someone wants to simply send an email using styles. Most people don’t know HTML. And having to use separate programs like that is a huge annoyance.
February 17th, 2006 at 11:32 am
Mike: Format=flowed can bite me. Sorry, but I want control over my line lengths, and don’t want them wrapping at the window width. And notice that Eudora offers the option to turn format=flowed off.
Mick: I am indeed an ardent SpamSieve user, but I haven’t yet hooked it up to Mail because I have yet to receive a single spam — not a single one — with my Joyent email address.
February 18th, 2006 at 4:03 am
[...] pundit John Gruber, and Leander Kahney of Wired news. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your ownsite. [...]
February 21st, 2006 at 3:05 am
[...] Tim Gaden’s been doing a series on various Mac folks’ usage of Mail.app. He’s talked with folks like John Gruber, Mathowie, and Ethan Schoonover about what they like (and don’t) about OS X’s default mail application, as well as the ways they’d like to see it improve. [...]
April 15th, 2006 at 6:35 am
[...] John Gruber fucks it up [...]
April 17th, 2006 at 4:10 am
Why do you want control over line length? This has always struck me as an annoyance that should be abstracted away, and I can’t really find anything to complain about with regard to format=flowed.
May 20th, 2006 at 9:10 am
I can find several basic text problems with mail. It wraps lines at 76 characters and inserts a space, even in URLs which makes the URLs very difficult for anyone not using Apple mail.app to use. And you can’t turn it off.
The standard in mail for indicating a sig at the end of an email is a line by itself with only “dash dash space”. Apple Mail.app send this OK but when it receives it it interprets it as a wrapped line and rewaraps it (sometimes).
December 8th, 2006 at 9:30 am
I was a Mac user in 1980. Then moved to PCs in 1989, simply because Apple didn’t keep up with the technology. Since the new Macs are out. I thought I’d give Apple another try. Wow! Great hardware, a real OS, and great apps. Now we come to Mail.
There are no 80 character wide displays left on the planet. Why does Apple’s mail product wrap text *for me*? IBM punch cards were 80 characters wide, then CRT data displays of the same width. I don’t read my email on either.
When I reply to an email and include the text from another person, its formatted in wrapped lines, not the way the person sent it to me. Several people have complained about that I reformatted their text. No, Apple did, and feels autocratic about keeping it that way. eech.
Does someone out there really need 80 character display compatibility, on a very old CRT display that can’t wrap lines by itself?
Come on.. this means I have to move over to Thunderbird after all this work getting into the Macs for the first time in years.
December 31st, 2006 at 11:18 pm
Quoting Alex: “I was a Mac user in 1980.”
Impossible.