7 Responses to “Ten ways to make Mail.app better”

1. Jeffrey Flowers says:
   April 16th, 2006 at 12:11 am

   Obviously, Mail is not a perfect application. Being free and included with the operating system, there will probably always be some little thing about it that annoys people. That said, here are my irratations with Mail:

   1. Mail does not seem to be able to use the Unix mail spool, usually located in /var/mail in Unix systems. I see no reason why, on a Unix based system, Mail does not support this out of the box.

   2. When I used Mail, I didn’t notice any way to fix it when Mail would improperly thread messages. There should be some way to manually associate/unassociate a message to a thread.

   3. When I was using Mail I preferred to have message previewing off, meaning that when I viewed a message it was displayed in its own window. But unlike other mail clients, I could not figure out how to move to the next message in that same display window (most clients you can hit the down arrow to make the window display the next message). This feature might in Mail and I simply didn’t notice it.

   I ended up switching to Gmail but I am about to give Mail a try again, since Mailtags will give me the notes capability I have been wanting for some time.

2. Tim says:
   April 16th, 2006 at 9:59 am

   No 3. Not having used clients that employ this method of reading, i don’t miss it myself, but enough people do like reading their email this way, that the lack of an option does seem amazing.

   I guess it is part of the “low feature – low confusion” design philsophy that sees Mail is an email client for grannies, coupled with a low opinion of grannies.

3. Jose Manuel Araque says:
   April 17th, 2006 at 3:46 am

   Mail.app (Jaguar) has a number of bugs that I consider to be LETHAL:

   1. It took me weeks to move my Thunderbird mailboxes to Mail.app because the Import feature did not handle properly. I should have known then never to move my mail into Mail.app because I never had any problems with Thunderbird. But I was enticed by the promise of live Search capabilities.

   2. I have not been able to move to Tiger because Mail.app in Tiger failed to import the 20,000+ messages in my Sent.mbox. I have waited, and waited to see if Apple would fix these bugs, but…

   3. Sometime in the past 6 months, while waiting for these fixes, Mail.app decided to silently DROP 66% of my Sent.mbox (don’t ask me exactly when). I lost all my “Sent history” from 2002 through 2004. If you look around you will find plenty of postings about dissapearing mailboxes, corrupted mailboxes, etc.

   This is simply UNNACEPTABLE behaviour from any program I use, but Mail in particular is the neural center of modern communications. Even my 70+ year old mother has an email address. Emailing is the most important application in Consumer computerts today. Apple is treating Mail as a second rate app.

   I am going back to Thunderbird after this very painful experience.

4. Jeffrey Flowers says:
   April 17th, 2006 at 4:25 am

   Jose,

   I am sorry to hear to hear that you are having such a bad time with Mail. Hopefully, everything will eventually get worked out for you.

5. Tim says:
   April 17th, 2006 at 8:19 am

   Jose, too late to suggest this perhaps, but would the import go better for you following the suggestions in this post on switching from Thunderbird to Mail?

6. Michael says:
   April 17th, 2006 at 9:38 am

   I have used Mail.app since the beginning and have found it to be a very stable app. I’ve played with all the others (Thunderbird, Entourage, etc…) and always go back to the integration of Mail.app.

   I will admit that Mail.app has “forgotten” my inbox once. Everything was still on my HD, but for some weird reason, Mail.app wasn’t seeing it. Easy fix, but a little disturbing. I guess it proves the point about backing up. Many years without such as a hiccup from it. Access my G-mail without problems, and my .Mac account with nary a hitch.

   Junk mail filtering works great. Better than any other that I’ve used (Pretty much all of the others).

   Improvements….
   1. Make it snappier.
   2. Speed up the caching and downloading abilities.
   3. Stop being stupid and keep looking for a server if I’m not connected to the Internet!!!

   Not perfect in Mail-land, but stable and user friendly enough for 99% of all users.

7. Jose Manuel Araque says:
   April 17th, 2006 at 10:18 am

   I meant to say in the previous posting that the Import function has problems with Carriage Return – Line Feed. This surprised me because this is a well known problem when writing text files in Unix as opposed to writing them on Windows (my original mbox files resided on my Windows box): I can’t rememeber the very specifics, but when I figured it out I had to convert my some of my mbox files using a relatively simple but powerfull shell/sed combination or a Perl script. Of course I had to do the research, etc.

   Regarding backups, consider this situation: I always backup all my mailboxes every week to another machine in my Network (another Mac). Of course no one I know has a backup utility that will PAUSE if it detects that “the Sent.mbox is now 66% smaller than it was last week”. So I went along with the backup weeks ago without noticing the corrupt mailbox. I have a backup alright, but the backup is just as corrupt. Should I have written a special safer script to perform these backups? You would think that writing an mbox file is a well known operation and that the framework on top of which Mail.app was built would do use some sort of transaction protection when writing the files. I have read in Macintouch that the Sent mailbox gets corrupted when the drive is close to being full, which I remember happening a couple of times in the past 6 months. These were temporary space problems, and I dont have them anymore… but I already bitten,… and bitter.

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