Talking Mail.app: Rui Carmo
Rui Carmo is a project manager at a major European mobile operator who has decided to use Macs as his primary home platform.
He currently has an aging (but feisty) 800MHz G3 iBook, an original 20″ iMac G5 and a Mac mini, as well as a Linux IMAP server where he aggregates all his e-mail using arcane incantations of fetchmail and procmail.
His Tao of Mac 
blog is justly famous.
HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?
RC: Hmm. That’s a tricky one. I used to work off a NeXTCube, so I could say I’ve been using Mail.app for more than a decade - but it wasn’t my main mail account (and, more to the point, it isn’t the same application anymore), so I’ll focus on when I got back to using Macs - roughly four years ago.
As to what other clients I’ve used (on the Mac), well… Despite the odd invocation of mutt to rifle through mbox files or test something, I’ve never felt any interest in using anything else except Thunderbird. You see I still spend my time jumping between Mac, Windows and Linux, so it’s the only thing that has the potential to let me standardize on a simple, unified UI (with minor variations) across platforms.
Actually, I find myself using Thunderbird on a Mac quite regularly, since Mail.app doesn’t honor the SOCKS proxy settings in the Network Preferences pane.
Since I spend most of my time hooked up via SSH tunnels to someplace (so much so that I modded SSHKeyChain to add a “-D 1080″ to its SSH invocations), I need at least one graphical MUA that can do IMAP over SOCKS properly…
Besides that, the three things that prevent me from switching to Thunderbird permanently are lack of Address Book integration, lack of AppleScript support and Spotlight not playing well with it - some of which I expect to be fixed eventually.
HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?
RC: Well, I actually avoid plugins and tweaks like the plague - one thing you learn quickly enough when you use more than one machine is to keep things as simple and standard as possible, and installing and maintaining plugins and one-off tweaks across several machines soon becomes a nightmare - you end up relying on stuff that isn’t available everywhere, wasting time looking for and maintaining them, etc.
(And that is why I don’t use Mail.app rules or spam filtering either - nearly everything is processed and filed away by fetchmail and procmail on my home IMAP server, which also runs Spamassassin for good measure.)
So when I do use something, it has to have extra added value and be as unobtrusive as possible.
For instance, I’ve tried many of the plugins listed at http://www.tikouka.net/mailapp [You can find a more comprehensive list of plugins on the Hawk Wings Plugin and Add-on List. Cheeky but true :) -- HW] and the only one I’ve kept is Mail Act-On because it really helps me sort through my inbox faster - either by using basic actions or as a trigger for more complex AppleScript.
(I use AppleScript to deal with my RSS feeds - which I receive via e-mail - and to categorize and file away personal items. All mailing-list traffic is filed away using procmail on my server.)
As a counter-example, I know that many people swear by MailTags, but I can’t abide the UI - it’s a bit too kludgy for me, and a set of search folders can be just as good if you’re careful with your subject lines.
HW: What’s your favourite thing about Mail.app?
RC: The fact that the UI does not get in the way - in any way. It might not have a lot of bells and whistles, but it lets me do most of what I want with consummate ease.
So most of the gripes I have against it are usually things it doesn’t do (as a MUA) or bugs - and compared to the usual smoothness of the application, those tend to stick out like sore thumbs.
HW: What’s your pet hate about Mail.app?
RC: Well, I have a lot of pet hates regarding it (see http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2005-05-06 for a list of things that are mostly still unfixed), but the top one (besides lack of SOCKS support, which I mentioned above) has got to be its current penchant for not updating IMAP message counts properly - i.e., I either get an indication of there being two new messages in a folder when there actually are none, or it won’t update a remote IMAP mailbox until I close and re-launch it.
Since all of my personal e-mail is read via IMAP (from .Mac, another remote server and my home IMAP server, which holds several gigabytes of mail from the last few years), this is a major nuisance (Thunderbird, of course, works flawlessly in that regard, and against the same servers…).
HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?
RC: Look at Outlook 2003 - and I’m dead serious.
I can understand Apple not wanting to develop a full Exchange client (although I’d expect Exchange support to be a lot better than the current kludgy “Exchange account” mode) and I know that they are focused on individual users rather than the corporate desktop and collaboration features, but the base Mail.app UI is simply not good enough to handle large volumes of e-mail.
And that shows in the simplest stuff - like message previews and the details shown in message listings.
Basic accelerator keys are also poorly chosen. For instance, I have to Command-Shift-L to flag a message, whereas in Outlook a tap on Ins is enough.
But let’s look at message previews - I’ve been wanting a vertical preview pane for ages. It was possible to hack the .nib files in version 1.x to get one, the new widescreen displays cry out for it, and many other similar applications (like Thunderbird) have had it for years now, but Mail.app 2.0 still doesn’t have one. [See a mock-up of Mail.app with an Outlook-style Preview pane -- HW].
And neither does it have a “quick preview” like Outlook’s - there’s no way to show a text-only snippet of the contents in the message listing, so I can’t tell at a glance whether a message is important or interesting without clicking on it.
I bet that when either of those come they will be heralded as a major new improvement, even though they could have been implemented for ages…
Next up are message listings. The first thing that springs to mind (and one many people are likely to point out) is that Mail.app is probably the only MUA where you don’t have proper e-mail message threading (i.e., with multi-level indenting and using the appropriate message headers), but I’d go a step beyond that:
In Outlook you can mix and match column headers at will, as well as grouping messages by a specific header - and your changes are immediate and “sticky”, without the hassle of setting up a search folder.
This is tremendously useful when you want to slice and dice through older messages looking for a specific thread or pattern that you can’t easily formulate as a search, and one of the reasons I still prefer to use Outlook (via Remote Desktop or Virtual PC) when dealing with work e-mail.
Mail.app has no real ability to visually group messages - other than it’s pseudo-threading there’s only rule-based coloring, which is just as useless as Spotlight when you don’t know what you’re looking for in advance. In my opinion, this would be an area where Apple could really improve Mail.app and make it more than a “Granny mailer”.
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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, likes, mail.app, Rui Carmo, talking mail.appRelated posts