Savaging Mail’s sending silliness
Over at Betalogue, Pierre Igot, who has an eagle-eye for flaws in Apple’s user interface design, unloads on the behaviour of Mail’s Sent mail folder 
.
He points out:
Sending mail is a pretty essential process. When it comes to e-mail, it does not get much more basic than this. But for some reason, Mail 2.0’s user interface makes the process unnecessarily complicated and non-intuitive. The interface is OK (although still very inelegant) when things work as expected. But as soon as something fails, it’s a disaster.
What really annoys him is the way that the label of the Sent mail folder changes to “Sending…” when outgoing mail is being processed.
It’s ugly, he says, and it’s stupid. If you click on the “Sending…” folder, it displays all your sent messages except the one that is currently being sent. So where is it?
That’s the heart of the interface design failure:
It’s not in the “Sent†box, as we have just seen. It’s no longer in the “Drafts†box either…. So where is it? Well, that’s the kicker: It is nowhere. It is not in any visible part of the user interface in Mail. While the message is in the process of being sent, it effectively disappears from the user interface altogether and stays in some kind of UI limbo, until it’s finally sent—and then it miraculously reappears in the “Sent†box, as expected.
And don’t get him started on what happens next, especially if a message fails to send.
Read the whole post at Betalogue to find out how silly Mail is when that happens.
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March 2nd, 2007 at 1:37 am
This is a rather petty argument. Honestly, how many times has ANYONE really needed to see the message he/she just composed and sent WHILE IT’S BEING SENT?! I know I never have. Come on, give it up.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:40 am
Read that article some time last week. Got quite a kick out of it, especially as I don’t think I had ever seen the “Sending” box, though I’ve seen the Outbox while I was futzing with a broken mail server configuration. I wonder how this relates to the “alternate smtp server/blank email” bug. That one bit me a few times until I read about it (here, I think). The fact that an outgoing message doesn’t appear to exist on disk until it lands in Sent, Drafts or Outbox is indicative of the remaining larger issues in Mail.app and several other aspects of OS X. I’ve been a Mail.app user for quite a while, but some of these issues worry me at times (and are one of the reasons I’m glad my mail all lives on an IMAP server). Apple should spend some time on what the user doesn’t see to ensure data integrity and reliability, which will allow their developers to spend more time later on making working with that data easier and more productive for us. I hope they’ve taken the time to do so for 10.5.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:40 am
Maybe this is not the place to ask, or I am to stupid to fing it (or maybe it doesn’t exist), but I remember that there was a way of storing the “sent emails” in the same folder from whicn I am replying.
Is this possible or I am messing with other email program that I use to use?
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:12 am
good point there …
my sentiments exactly …
March 2nd, 2007 at 5:29 am
My Mail *sometimes* shows an “Outbox” , parallel to the Inbox, but when I just tested it, it went directly to “Sending”. Sometimes I know there’s an outgoing mail “somewhere”, but the Outbox doesn’t appear anywhere.
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:32 am
I think it’s a valid gripe - I’ve had a number of occasions where I’ve written a message and hit “send” without thinking just to realize as it’s sending that I used the wrong email address (I have my personal and business email accounts all in mail.app). Yes, that’s my own damn fault and arguably stupid, but It made me wish I had had some sort of recourse besides hurriedly turning off AirPort (at which time the Outbox appears).
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:49 am
I’ve noticed this, it’s pretty annoying.
I’d like to see a progress bar or something.
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:17 am
My Mail has an Outbox and always shows mail being sent there until it makes its “Sent” noise. So it goes Draft>Outbox>Sent. Makes perfect sense to me.
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:23 pm
I think selecting Activity Viewer in the menu tells you all you need to know about what is happening with your sent mail. Just sayin…
March 3rd, 2007 at 5:34 am
This armchair quarterback/designer needs to find other things to do. His made-up scenario is laughable, and his whole tone is nothing but barely-masked self-promotion. There’s no value for Mail users here, why bother linking to it?
March 4th, 2007 at 8:36 am
I partially disagree with his criticism. Let’s just put the error scenario aside for a moment. All the years I have used Windows I found the “Outbox” pretty much useless and annoying. I still feel the same way. I actually don’t want to see a mailbox that is empty most of the time all the time in the interface of a program that I frequently use. So it is my opinion that not using the outbox does make very much sense and perfectly fits the simplistice concept Mac applications should have.
Now, the fact that a static mailbox name changes from “Sent” to “Sending…” is just great. I really can’t see why this is “ugly”. What could be more intuitive than placing such a message right where you can see it and not using any valuable extra space somewhere else, where you are likely not to look for it anyway?
The only problem is that when you click on it, it doesn’t actually show you that one message. Although I think this really is a minor problem, maybe the outbox could appear as a subsidary of the “Sent” mailbox, just as the different mailboxes of different accounts appear. Or the mail being send appears in that “Sent” mailbox with some kind of color label.
Yes, there is room for improvement on this issue, but the propositions that blog author makes wouldn’t fit my idea of intuitive Mac use at all.
March 4th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I think the opinionator in the blog article is probably pining for Outlook Express. He had it “so much easier” when he used MS. Really, that’s just what it seems like to me, and I found nothing constructive in his bloviating on the design aspect of Mail. If anything, his arguments were beyond silly and seemed like self-promotion.
Mail is a great app, and like others posted here, I didn’t get anything out of Pierre’s whinging….
March 5th, 2007 at 8:22 am
Luis Alejandro Masanti Says:
“… I remember that there was a way of storing the “sent emails†in the same folder from which I am replying.”
IIRC, Eudora has an option for this. Unfortunately, that means you’re out of luck, because Qualcomm has announced it is discontinuing Eudora.
Some of the functionality Eudora had will survive in the form of an “extension” to Mozilla’s Thunderbird that’s being written by ex-Eudora programmers, but I don’t know whether that will include the feature you recalled there:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope
March 8th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Yes, I remember using a previous version of Mail (I don’t know which) that gave me a progress percent when I selected a message I was sending in the Outbox. How come they took that out?? That would be a perfect plug-in.
March 17th, 2007 at 8:39 am
Click Window, Activity monitor to view a progress bar or stop what is being sent.
November 10th, 2007 at 1:57 am
This is a serious flaw I believe, especially when you have more than one email in your sending queue… how are you supposed to know what is being sent, which order they are being sent in and to who?!
March 17th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
I haven’t really thought too hard about this but I find it useful to drop the assumption that everyone else is an idiot sometimes and ask “why would they have done that”?
Perhaps having the message disappear when being sent is not a bug but a feature. Maybe the idea is to prevent users modifying the message when it’s in the unpredictable state between “drafted” and “sent”.
If you were able to make modifications while the message was in transit how could you be sure that the changes were the ones that actually made it to its recipient? Now add to the problem by asking what happens if the message fails to send after you made edits.