In recent days two big hitters have aired their grievances about Mail.app.
Pierre Igot (read his “Talking Mail.app” interview) at Betalogue describes the odd way 
in which Mail handles format=flowed text.
If you place your cursor at the beginning of a line of quoted text and hit return, Mail actually inserts two returns. Pierre says:
I don’t care what the reason for this is. The reality is that it is purely and simply wrong. There is no excuse for inserting two return characters where the user only meant to insert one.
What’s more, he says,
there are still many “smaller†bugs such as this one that have not been fixed. And, frankly, there is no sign of them getting fixed any time soon. At this point, bug reports about such “minor†flaws simply remain unanswered.
Rui Carmo (read his “Talking Mail.app” interview) at Tao of Mac also unloads on Mail in a big way in a recent post.
Rui prefaces a long list of over twenty bugs in Mail.app with a plea:
Apple, this is not a MUA. It’s a shambles…. In fact, I’m willing to bet a lot of people will tend to agree… especially those who use Mail.app professionally, against big e-mail archives or to keep track of mailing-lists other than the local knitting club.
Yeah, the same thing that bugs Pierre has always bugged me, except I come to the opposite conclusion: Mail should insert *3* blank lines (none quoted), with the cursor on the middle one.
I’ve never used IMAP or Exchange, so I’m in no position to comment on half of Rui’s gripes, although I concur on the other half.
Hmmm – I have to admit that while there are a few little things about Mail.app that I’m not 100% happy about, all in all I find that it does a bang up job of things (for me, anyway, YMMV).
I currently use it with my .mac account, my Exchange account at the office, and 3 separate IMAP accounts with loads of automated rules that handle all of my mailing lists that reroute between my main account, and my archive IMAP account. I have a relatively high volume of mail to wade through (over 900 messages over the last long weekend – I got the number since my DSL connection at home was down and everything got synced when I got to the office).
I’ve never had any significant issues with it, and still find the UI considerably better adapted to my usage than Entourage (ugly) or any of the other clients I’ve tried. I’m currently waiting on the next big version of MailTags to start storing info in the IMAP messages in order to be able to cross sync meta data between user accounts, but that’s on my ‘nice to have’ rather than ‘absolute must have’ list.
For reference, my Mail folder in the Library weighs in at nearly 2Gb.
I have a show-stopper beef with Apple Mail (and with Safari, Address Book and iCal). Other than minor upgrades, I can’t upgrade it unless I upgrade the operating system. I have five Macs, all of them with Panther, which runs just fine. I am not going to upgrade the entire operating system just so I can get version 2 of these applications. Tying them to OS upgrades is just wrong and debilitating. For that reason, and that reason alone, I am migrating everyone in my control away from Mail, Safari, Address Book, and iCal.
Dang…. does hawkwings have a gripe against Apple Mail or what? Honestly… this is your second blog I’ve seen on the subject. I imagine you as a bitter person just pacing around the room cursing Mail under your breath all day long. Sure, in my experience Mail has some very minor quirks. But nothing to write flaming blogs about. It would be better served writing Apple about issues you are having. I do it all the time when something rears it’s ugly head. I currently have 4,572 messages in my in-box…. and another good 3,000+ locally on my drive. True, I’m not using any IMAP accounts… which may be horrific for all I know, but I’m running 3 POP accounts under Mail with nary a hitch.
I’ve actually found Apple’s Mail team to be quite responsive about fixing bugs. I found one, blogged about it, and had contacts with a couple members of the team as they were trying to pin it down.
I posted a synopsis on my blog:
http://www.sparkplug9.com/bizhack/index.php/2006/04/09/blogging-apple-listens/
Heavyhitters? Never heard of these guys before. I’ve been doing Mac support and managing e-mail servers and clients since 1990. Mail.app is OK, not great. Some of the points are valid, others, simply personal choices. Mail.app is easier to use than Outlook, Eudora, Entourage, and most other mail programs. But it does lack some of the nicer features of some these programs. IMAP support specifically seems flaky, especially with .mac accounts, and I concur with concerns about it endlessly scanning IMAP directories. Sure, I have some gripes about Mail.app, but just as many for PowerMail, Entourage, and Outlook on the PC. PowerMail needs to have direct HTML support, and it would be nice for Thunderbird to be more integrated with the MacOS (Address Book, iCal, etc.). But the beauty of it all is that, even on a Mac, you have a choice of free and paid e-mail clients.
I agree. Who are these guys and who gives a rip what they think?
Erm… Guys? My post’s a year old now. And some of those bugs are still there…
@Poster: I give a rip what these guys think because the acuteness of their observations, their experience and balanced assessment earns my respect (and the respect of many others).
@Dwalla: hehehe… I don’t give up two and a half hours of every day finding stuff and post and writing it because I hate Mail.app. Quite the reverse.
It’s just how the news falls out sometimes. It is just as common to see a string of overwhelmingly positive posts on Hawk Wings. If not, I make up the positive ones myself from time to time.
As a general rule, I try to pitch the site half-way between unthinking adulation and mindless critique.
I think my main beef with Mail is that it requires Spotlight to search the body of messages. This effects me because I disable Spotlight on my Mac because I have no need for it.
Luckily, I use Gmail so it doesn’t matter too much.
“Luckily, I use Gmail so it doesn’t matter too much.”
Yes, Gmail, let’s just hand over all of our correspondence to a marketing firm. Let my personal correspondence drive the new Internet economy, ranking the keywords in my mail, selling that information to folks whom I may or may not care for.
Folks get into a huff when standard US mail gets damaged in transit, but we allow an Internet marketing firm (Google) to scan and index my correspondence. Not that emails are particularly secure in the first place.
Not only won’t I use Gmail, I won’t send any email to a Gmail account.
That is your choice. It doesn’t make Gmail bad.
“Heavyweights” = really fat Mac users who complain a lot.
just kiddin’
[...] Pierre Igot at Betalogue has some of the sharpest eyes in the blogging world. He repeatedly sees flaws in interface design that I overlook. Whether it is problems with the way Mail handles the format=flowed feature or threading, he’s got it nailed. [...]