AppleInsider’s 10.4.7 Mail.app tease
AppleInsider has revealed 
that the instructions accompanying the first builds of 10.4.7 are asking testers to focus their attention on Mail.app among other things.
That would be nice, especially since the last update, 10.4.6, didn’t offer much to Mail.app users.
No further details about possible changes have emerged, although an ever-hopeful poster on Apple’s Discussion Boards asks , if “they will finally add HTML Composition Support”.
I hope not. There are more important things that could be fixed first. Better IMAP implementation is at the top of my list.
What’s at the top of yours?
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Tags: 10.4.7, Apple Mail, HTML, imap, mail.app, updates
May 19th, 2006 at 12:02 am
My main concern having moved from Evolution (and mutt console-wise) on Linux to Mail.app is the handling of multipart MIME messages.
The most obvious example is related to the Mailman mailing list manager, some administrator notifications include the original message as an attachment which then I could use as a separate message without having to save in a separate file or other complicated solutions: reply to original sender, or also drag&drop to a local mailbox. Or I could reply to yet another attachment which is a mini-message with admin instructions.
Same goes for mailing list digests as MIME multipart (cannot isolate a single message) or sending out a forward with the original message as attachment – I believe that all these features are deeply related.
I do manage mailing lists, probably it’s obvious by now. :-)
May 19th, 2006 at 12:03 am
Support for the mail spool in /var/mail would be nice but I’m not holding my breath.
May 19th, 2006 at 12:08 am
One thing I would like to see is being able to connect to an exchange server using https+webdav. This with address book and calendaering being able to do this would allow the intel mac users to co-exist in a pure exchange environemnet without having to load MS Office 2004 and run it under Rosetta.
May 19th, 2006 at 12:11 am
It wil never come in a X.x.x upgrade, but I would love to see a text formating palette or bar, especially one that allows me to do HTML lists (bullets, numbers, etc.). I have users coming from Outlook and being able to have more “Word-like” text formatting is one of their number one requests.
I try to explaing to them the downfalls of HTML-formatted email, but they don’t care…
May 19th, 2006 at 12:23 am
Location Awareness!
Mail should be able to contact different servers and use different protocols when in different locations. For example, at home contact my domain’s POP server directly and use VPN to get to work, but at work contact my domain’s POP server through a proxy while directly connecting to work.
As it is, I have to have multiple “accounts”, need to worry about duplicated mail, and need to worry about switching some on and some off.
May 19th, 2006 at 1:22 am
Mail should have a new name, and why not slip that change in during a X.x.x upgrade. I mean, “Mail” sounds so masculine that it’s certainly offputting to at least half the global population, maybe more. How about something softer like sheMail? Or feMail at the very least?
Maybe they shoud just call it “it”, but then that might offend IT people…
May 19th, 2006 at 2:04 am
Mail still has a lot of bugs. Sometimes messages that I’ve read show up as unread. You can’t set custom headers on your Smart Folders (unless they fixed it since I last checked). Sometimes if you drag a message from a Smart Folder it ends up being copied instead of moved. That kind of thing.
May 19th, 2006 at 2:08 am
within the Address Book or Mail application, select a book that contains many addresses. (enough so you have to scroll down)
select all of the addresses.
then while holding down the Apple/Command key, deselect single addresses from the bottom of the list with the mouse (or anywhere other than the very top). as soon as you deselect one, the list automatically jumps to the very top.
it should stay where it is within the scroll for the next possible selection so you don’t have to rescroll back down to where you were.
May 19th, 2006 at 2:36 am
I second Wayne’s request for Location Awareness. Also, I’d like the ability to schedule the exact time an email is sent out.
May 19th, 2006 at 3:25 am
Ah – yes – Shemail -
‘beautiful on the outside… but underneath, throbbing power!’
May 19th, 2006 at 3:29 am
I hope also that we get better IMAP support, especially the capability to subscscribe AND to unsubscribe to certain mailfolders on the server. As for location awareness I don’t know how easy it would be to take care of all possible configurations. Currently I use a combination shell/apple script to change my default smtp and printer depending on my IP. This works, but it would be nice if we could change the smtp server from the command line without applescript and without opening Mail.app.
May 19th, 2006 at 5:51 am
IMAP, IMAP, IMAP!! Speed is my main issue. Make IMAP faster and I will be very happy, regardless of whatever else may be included.
May 19th, 2006 at 6:40 am
How about integration with www browsers which aren’t Safari, i.e. the option for contextual menu’s: “search in google” to open in the browser of your choice. Or am I missing something?
May 19th, 2006 at 7:40 am
I’m with Ron Rosson. I have installed Office Mac on my PowerBook for a single reason – Exchange and Outlook Web Access support in Entourage.
I work as a consultant and have OWA access to my mail from almost every client site (client policies permitting). I can actually use Entourage on most of these sites rather than the browser interface. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem any way I can get Mail.app to talk to this server, even from inside my office network.
With this functionality added, I could dump Entourage and the rest of Office, go back to Mail.app and OpenOffice and be a happy little Vegemite.
May 19th, 2006 at 8:15 am
IMAP please!!! A real IMAP implementation, subscribe/unsubscribe folders, etc.
And bring back the status bar!!!
May 19th, 2006 at 8:26 am
@Dan, if you set another browser as your default in Safari’s General Preferences, I think you’ll get the behaviour that you are after.
May 19th, 2006 at 8:42 am
Return recept might be nice.
May 19th, 2006 at 8:48 am
@Tim, thanks for the tip. I have just double-checked and my default browser *is* FireFox. Does the fix work for you and not for me? Perhaps I need a clean user account if so.
May 19th, 2006 at 9:13 am
That’s weird. Yes, it seems that it is working for me and not for you.
Have you tried to select a different browser for a while, checking that the change makes Mail open URLs with the new browser, and then changing back to Firefox to see if that “forces” a fix?
May 19th, 2006 at 9:37 am
a ‘widescreen view’, or ’3 pane view’ or whatever you kids call it these days ;)
May 19th, 2006 at 9:44 am
Like this one or this one
?
May 19th, 2006 at 9:57 am
yes! exactly what i mean. thanks! :)
and thanks for deleting my accidental double post (sorry about that).
May 19th, 2006 at 10:44 am
How about, implement features like:
1 – selective download which email
2 – skip current email download
Hmmm lost my train of thots
May 19th, 2006 at 11:05 am
Carl is right: forget features, let’s get some bugs fixed. The “0 messages, 100 unread” one. The endless activities in the activity monitor that stop anything happening. The blocking “invalid SSL certificate” one. The “invalid valid password” one. The list goes on and on. These need to be fixed before new features (which always come with new bugs) are added.
I suppose you could include fixing IMAP with that; I avoid IMAP as much as possible – it’s a terrible protocol (have you read the RFC?).
May 19th, 2006 at 11:07 am
One more thing :) If I was to request a feature, then it would be increasing the speed. Mail is slow. It’s showing text files (with a tiny bit of parsing)! There’s no reason for that to be slow.
May 19th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
I would like to queue a message to be sent at a future time. (Send message on or after 2006-05-21). Eudora had this and it was great. Like Marco said above.
The other thing I miss from Eudora is being able to edit the subject line of a message in the mailbox list display. This helps with messages received with misleading or irrelevent subjects. Also the ability to edit any part of a received message would be handy.
May 19th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
Just fix the IMAP damage wrought in 10.3.9 (and not fixed since)!
If I see that stupid “Comparing notes with server…” (surely THE most worthless diagnostic message ever – how about telling us WHAT the Hell it’s doing, Apple?!?) one more time, while Mail.app sits there and does NOTHING until I click on the red stop sign in frustration to make it stop and do a Synchronize so that it almost functions, I’ll scream!!!
Hire some of Mozilla’s Thunderbird engineers, Apple – they seem to be able to do IMAP right.
I can’t even think of anything else (though I know other things bug me) because of this IMAP brain-damage issue.
May 19th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
IMAP, IMAP, my vote is on better IMAP support. If that would be properly supported I will switch back to Mail and leave Thunderbird.
May 19th, 2006 at 11:24 pm
Maybe Apple will finally get Mail to work with POP3 correctly. I’m still having problems with Mail downloading all my mail and I still have emails get lost in space when I send.
May 19th, 2006 at 11:26 pm
Unfortunately, Mail continues to handle links which are longer than one line improperly which results in “broken” links being sent to others. Apart from the inconvenience to recipients, the whole matter reflects very poorly upon Apple with the recipients…when Apple is touting the superiority of its hardware and software.
This problem has existed since at at least 10.3.9. I am reasonably certain it existed before that but no longer have machines with an earlier OS installed to verify this. It has been reported to Apple and nothing has been done about it.
May 19th, 2006 at 11:33 pm
1. IMAP individual/selective synchronization of folders.
2. Better optimization of the codes that it can handle my 300.000 emails (15 years) of emails.
3. Real search and smartbox with… x AND (y OR z)
4. Possibility to do smartboxes on any headers of the mails.
5. Templating system
6. Real mbox support
7. Moving between the panes with the keyboard only (See Netnewswire)
May 20th, 2006 at 10:45 am
Fix the bugs first, especially ones that cause message lossage. I want IMAP support that’s as reliable as Mulberry’s. Save changes to IMAP mailboxes on the server sooner so they’re not in an unsynchronized state if Mail crashes; toggling an IMAP account offline/online shouldn’t be necessary as a workaround for that.
A few previously unmentioned requests:
• Ability to select a message from the keyboard without displaying it in the preview pane and without marking it as read. Example usage: select and Junk false negative spam messages without displaying them.
• Option-click the address field of a message in the message list to do the equivalent of a search for that address in the currently selected mailbox(es).
• Allow any sender address to use any SMTP (outgoing) account instead of being unnecessarily associated with a specific IMAP/POP3 (incoming) account.
• Support IMAP server-side threading capabilities.
Btw, I agree with Tony that IMAP is an icky protocol. Hard to think of a better reason why so many client implements are lacking (in capability and reliability); servers aren’t quite as bad. Too often it’s not obvious what works and doesn’t with different client/server combinations.
May 21st, 2006 at 2:54 am
Make SmartMailboxes actually smart. Spotlight offers boolean search criteria, please provide some way for me to use it in Mail. The need to create SmartMailboxes which search for specific things in other SmartMailboxes is dumb.
Don’t even feel like you have to create a UI for this. Just give me a way to use ‘defaults’ from the command line to create smarter smart mailboxes and I’ll be happy. As it is, even the preference file is limited in the same way as the UI.
May 21st, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Option to delete mail from POP3 server when deleted locally.
May 29th, 2006 at 9:47 am
A proper smart folder which can search on mail headers not shown in the default mail-view, eg matching mailing list headers. And it would be nice to have a smart search folder that displays those messages that aren’t matched by any smart folder search.
May 29th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
Yep, being able select arbitrary headers (e.g. List-ID) in Smart Mailbox matches would be very useful. Unfortunately that’s still only possible within rules.
September 27th, 2006 at 5:11 pm
I second the wish for https/webdav functionality. If Mail.app could work directly with an Exchange server through https many users would be able to ditch Entourage. I think that many mac users in a business environment can’t use IMAP/POP because of firewalls.
November 28th, 2006 at 8:29 am
Without https/webdav and the ability to unsubscribe to IMAP folders, connecting to an Exchange server via imap sucks because there are hundreds of public folders and all the other garbage folders that aren’t really mail (tasks, contacts, notes, etc.) that get in the way.
Another thing that would be nice is some kind of profile setup. Example: most email comes to and is sent as dude@example.com, but some mail (esp. to lists) needs to be sent as dude@admin.example.com or dude@store.example.com. Currently, I have to create a complete dummy account just to send as these alternative addresses.
November 28th, 2006 at 9:26 am
You can add additional comma-separated sender addresses in the Email Address field under the Account Information tab of any account in Mail’s Accounts preferences. It’s explained in the “Adding multiple email alias addresses to an account” section of Mail help.