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More post-10.4.7 Mail pains

TigerDVDAlthough my own experience of the 10.4.7 update and Mail.app has been completely trouble-free, not everyone has been so lucky. MacUser carries a good summary of some general problems.

MacInTouch has a collection of readers’ reports about problems following the recent update. Almost all of them mention Mail. The posters either have problems or are just disillusioned like this one:

It’s been how many years now, that Mail has been out? How many updates to the OS, and still, *still* Apple has not fixed the problem that Mail has wrt long URIs: It breaks them in such a way that only Mail seems to be able to handle. Users of other Mail software are unable to click on the resulting links.

With the 10.4.7 update, they’ve certainly addressed some bugs in Mail, but this is STILL not one of them. I think the argument can be made that it’s more serious than some of the ones they have fixed.

I’ve reported this bug several times to Apple, as have my colleagues, but maybe we need a more public rant.

I don’t think that Apple will “fix” this problem. The “delsp=yes” flag that triggers this behaviour (read more about it in an earlier Hawk Wings post) is well-documented in the RFC standard.

Apple (I imagine) doesn’t think this is a bug in Mail.app. It’s the rest of the world that lags behind, and we Mail users must wait for other email clients to catch up.

We just have to take the taunts of our non-Mail-using buddies on the nose, or use one workaround or another in the meantime.mail.app, apple mail, 10.4.7, problems, bugs, frustrations, broken URLs, delsp=yes, RFC

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This entry was posted on Friday, 30th June, 2006 at 2:12 am and is filed under Apple Mail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “More post-10.4.7 Mail pains”

  1. Don Parr says:
    June 30th, 2006 at 9:59 am

    I feel bad for all those experiencing negative issues with the 10.4.7 upgrade :(. I started with 10.4.2 on my 14-inch iBook G4 last September (’05). 10.4.7 is my 5th upgrade and all but one, including 10.4.7, went as smooth as silk, and yes, I’m speaking for myself and “Genie,” my iBook. The one that didn’t wasn’t OS X really, it was a single application the author, or developer, had to tweak in order for it to play nice with the upgrade, which was done rather swiftly I might add :). I’m hoping with time, all those with less than optimal experiences will find the fixes necessary to make all well with the World, 10.4.7 and OS X once again.

  2. Daniel WECK says:
    July 3rd, 2006 at 2:53 am

    I am affected by the URL-split bug, which is very annoying for the receivers, as they have to re-compose the URL manually and copy/paste !!!
    I am reading your workaround tips now ;)

  3. Tim says:
    July 3rd, 2006 at 8:10 am

    Hi Daniel. Thanks for your kind comments elsewhere. Just to clarifiy — every Mail.app user has this “Broken URL” bug feature. It’s built-in to the way Mail handles text.

    Feels good to be so innovative, eh?

  4. Dan Warne says:
    July 5th, 2006 at 3:55 pm

    Apple can be a bit too quick to adopt new standards sometimes. See, in the tech industry, something may be a standard, but unless there’s some likelihood of the industry adopting it there’s not much point going it alone. It’s like the ExpressCard slots in MacBook Pros… not the slightest bit useful yet and probably won’t be ever, given the prevalence of cheap USB2 devices.

    Adopting an obscure RFI standard for URLs really isn’t cool, unless there’s some momentum behind it with other mail application developers, which it doesn’t appear that there is.

    In the meantime, Apple Mail users have to put up with complaints from receivers of their email… Apple really should change their stance on this.

  5. Daniel WECK says:
    July 5th, 2006 at 5:10 pm

    Update: I have started using the HTML-link-workaround, for work and for personal emails. TinyURL just does not feel right to me, a bit like wanting to obfuscate the destination URL…

    I’m gutted really, as I am in favor of plain-text and myself hate receiving colored emails with weird fonts…(which happens a lot when people use HTML)

    I have no idea how my email look on the receiver side yet. I hope Mail.app does not add to much crap in my email mime-parts when I switch to HTML mode.

    Dan.

  6. L Larson says:
    April 10th, 2007 at 12:58 am

    I may be wrong but it’s my observation that it is not just URLs but also any lines of plaintext messages that are broken by Apple Mail when a message is sent. Messages that get forwarded a few times end up looking butchered. By broken, I mean a carriage return/line feed is inserted. If I want messages to go out with Mac-style plaintext (no CRLF until end of paragraph), can I do it? Does anyone know how to control a setting or hidden default in Apple Mail that turns line breaking on/off?

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