On Apple Discussions Martin Marconcini has discovered a way to bring Mail.app to a screaming halt in three easy steps.

Frustrated by Mail’s tendency to freeze when he dragged anything onto Mail’s Dock icon, he went back and painstakingly restored his Mail installation step-by-step until the glitch re-emerged.

Here’s what he discovered (you can test it for yourself):

One: Set Mail’s New message default in the Composing preference pane to plain text.

Two: Add a signature to your email account in the Signatures Preference pane. Make sure that you select it at the bottom of the signature pane to be added to every new message by default:

Three: Drag an image or anything else onto Mail’s Dock icon.

That’s a big, 100%-repeatable train wreck for me.

It seems like a common configuration; it’s not restricted to dragging ClarisWorks documents onto the Dock icon when the signature contains a particular accented Laotian character. How does such a thing not emerge in internal testing? Perhaps I am too romantic about internal testing.

Anyway, happily, I am in the clear. All my signatures are just a few keystrokes away in TextExpander.

But Martin suggests some workarounds for those plagued by these freezes:

a) Use Rich Text (not an option if you use Blackberry or need plain text)
b) Use Plain Text but remove the signatures (can be a Pain In the A** if you use different business accounts like me with odd disclaimers that are a “must”).
c) Roll back to Safari 3.0.* and either use it or use Camino/Opera/Firefox/Etc. Could be a problem if you rely on Safari stuff like Inquisitor, 1Password, etc.
d) Don’t drag attachments to the dock icon…

On 8 April Apple acknowledged this as “a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering”.

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The new mail alert sound in Mail.app was broken when Leopard was released last year. Three updates later, and it’s still broken.

[UPDATE: In deference to posters in the comments below, I should point out that not everyone experiences this problem. It only affects most/many/some/a few users. Like me.]

Fortunately, there is a work-around which you can use until Apple gets around to fixing the problem. It’s a bit fiddly, but not too forbidding.

First download this zip file from Hawk Wings which contains an applescript and the default “new mail” audio file.

Unzip it, and place the audio file in your ~/Library/Sounds folder (where “~” is shorthand for your user directory).

Then open up the script in place the script in Script Editor. You will see that all it does is execute a shell script — do shell script "afplay /Users/timbo/Library/Sounds/NewMail.aiff > /dev/null 2>&1 &". You will need to edit it to replace the name of my user directory with yours.

Then save it in your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail folder. If you don’t have such a folder, it’s worth creating one.

Now you need to create a rule in Mail.app that triggers the script whenever a new email arrives.

Open up the Rules pane in Mail’s Preferences:

Create a new rule. Call it something creative like “New Mail Alert Work-around” and fill out the rest as per the screenshot. I like to restrict it to people who are in my list of previous senders–it’s a quick and dirty way to rule out being alerted to the arrival of spam. Obviously, there are other ways to select conditions here which restrict when the alert will be triggered.

Also, in the “Perform the following action” field, you will need to select “Run AppleScript”, then navigate to ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail and select the NewMailAlert.scpt that you saved there earlier.

All done. Send yourself a test email, and rejoice. Mail.app is talking to you again.

For extra spice you could use one of the hundreds of mail alert sounds listed at Email Gifs and Sounds (Or perhaps Scully is more your thing?) but have compassion on your work colleagues. That could get really annoying after a while.

[With thanks to the original posters in an Apple Discussion thread ]

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Like many people (but apparently not all), when I drag an item from the Finder to Mail.app’s Dock icon, it launches two messages, the first without the attachment, the second one with it.

Obviously, this is annoying and I have always regarded it as just that. However, today, a poster on the Apple Discussion Forums points out an even more annoying aspect of this new “feature” in Leopard Mail:

If I drag a file from Finder to Mail icon in Dock, Mail opens and creates two windows. I write my message in the window in front.

Then I get interrupted, and when I come back I need to write another message to a different recipient before I complete the first message. I use the second window for this message (convenient as it is already there…) I place a different file in this message and send it. My first message window then disappears!

Fine, I think - I´ll write it again. Only, it turns out that the recipient of my SECOND message received the FIRST message, including attachment and everything written in the body area (not in subject area). I work with clients for whom discretion is important - this is risky as sensitive information can end up in the wrong places!!!

Hmmmm… Maybe it is a good idea to use the Attachment button in the Toolbar until this one gets fixed.

UPDATE: Johann suggests in the comments that this is a MailTags problem. Testing — the kind of testing that one should do before pushing out a blog post — clearly demonstrates that it is (for me anyway), based on a statistical sample of one. But Scott knows about it, which means that will probably be fixed even before this update is posted!

UPDATED UPDATE: The controversy continues. The original poster and many others claim that they get this behaviour without MailTags installed. Follow it blow by blow in the Apple Discussions.

UP-TO-DATEST UPDATE: Glenn posts in the comments that this is a bug in Leopard Mail and quotes Apple’s response to his submission of a bug report:

This is a follow up to Bug ID# 5630858. After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering. This issue has been filed in our bug database under the original Bug ID# 5243377.

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Pierre Igot takes aim at the behaviour of the Save button in Leopard Mail, with the rigour and vigour which are his trademarks.

In Tiger Mail, he points out, you could click on the button to bring up a “Save As…” dialog that offered a location for saving all the attachments in the message.

In Leopard Mail, however, you need to click-and-hold on the button in order to bring up an enhanced contextual menu with more options for individual attachments.

He calls this a bug rather than an improvement:

The simple and most obvious option, which is a single click on the button, no longer works—which does not make sense, because the button’s visual appearance suggests both a regular button that responds to a single click (like the “Quick Look” button next to it) and a button that brings up a pop-up menu (with the triangle). Besides, the tool tip clearly suggests that the button should respond to a simple click as well.

I’ve had more than one email from users who thought that the button was broken, because it did nothing when they clicked it., so Pierre is not alone.

Head over to Betalogue and read the whole piece.

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The shell script security exploit exposed and then fixed in Tiger Mail has been reintroduced into Leopard Mail.

The loophole allows a sender to disguise an executable file (say, a shell script) as an image or some other harmless file. When clicked on, the executable file runs. Don’t remember? See the Hawk Wings post at the time (Feb, 2006).

Now, it’s back. You can test for yourself. The Heise Security web site offers to send you a test email. Give them an email address and after a confirmation, the email arrives:

CLick on the “jpg” to open it, and it runs a shell script, listing your current directory and exiting harmelessly:

Last time, the news prompted a range of responses, some of them rather hysterical. One writer even claimed that it made Mail.app too dangerous to use.

I am happy to follow John Gruber’s lead (again). As he said last time:

“It boils down to this: you can’t safely double-click files from untrusted sources, and you never could. This is no different today on Mac OS X 10.4 than it was a decade ago on Mac OS 8 and 9.”

Puzzling that it’s back, yes. But dangerous? No more than usual.

UPDATE: “FatYank” provides a quick fix in the comments for those who are really worried about this:

The workaround for this is to rename Terminal. When you rename Terminal and double click on the JPG, you get a message stating that Preview cannot open the file.

Or, as Rob points out, you could use Quickview to view attachments first, in which these “fake” file show up as empty.

Thanks!

[Via The Register ]

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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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