Hawk Wings » Apple Mail

Mail.app’s disappearing POP mail trick

Tim Gaden — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:13:16 +0000

David Buxton at Reliably Broken has written a good explanation of the way Apple Mail treats email in POP and IMAP accounts, contrasting it (at the end) with the way Entourage handles each protocol.

As he notes:

Now when you go to remove an IMAP account Mail.app deletes all the local mailboxes for that IMAP account. This is not a problem, after all those local mailboxes are simple caches; the only reason the client keeps a copy is as a performance optimisation (as noted above).

Now when you remove a POP account Mail.app deletes all messages sent or received via that account, even though there will be no copy of those messages on the server (especially true for sent messages).

Not paying attention to this often has tragic results, as you can read in “The Mail POP Disaster: When it’s gone, it’s gone” and in Apple’s Mail Discussions (passim).

David dislikes this behaviour for POP accounts. He concludes: “This is not useful or intuitive – it is a bad design.” And he is not alone, by any means.

What do you think?

Not normally a huge Apple fan-boi, I actually side with the company on this one.

First, Apple gives you a big, fat warning when you attempt to delete a POP account, telling you quite plainly what will happen next — that this action will delete the settings, mailboxes and messages associated with that account:

Secondly, this behaviour makes sense. When you think of “an email account”, do you think of just the settings, or the mailboxes and email in that account as well? When users want to delete an account, Apple is right to take them at their word, and to delete everything.

Or to put it another way, to what extent are companies like Apple obliged to protect users from themselves? Some of my friends in User Support have strong (maximised) views on this, but may not be completely disinterested.

I might be wrong. I am open to persuasion. It just looks to me like Apple is getting panned for designing a process that actually does what the user wants.

Of course, the real moral of the story is not about design. It is backup, backup, backup!

It’s not Apple’s fault that so few people make them. I remember being appalled to learn during the 2006 WWDC Keynote that “only about four percent of users are utilizing automated software for backing up important files — only a quarter of users back up in any way whatsoever on a regular basis.” (Thanks to MacWorld for a transcript of the event)

Since Leopard, there’s no reason (apart from the performance hit and a few small annoyances) why people aren’t running Time Machine. Or one of the many other excellent backup solutions.

Just make sure that you are backing up up all the Mail files you should be.Similar Posts:

Huzzah! Hawk Wings serves 5 million pages

Tim Gaden — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:23:21 +0000

I’m sorry for the lapse in taste, but I can’t help myself.

This morning at 6.05 am, Hawk Wings served its 5 millionth page to the world.

At least, that’s the total Mint has cranked up since I installed it in July 2006:

So, 3,425 page impressions a day on average, every day for four years. Thanks to everyone who has dropped by, especially to those loyal readers who kept me in their RSS feeds despite repeated long periods of inactivity.

Teary-eyed, as I stand before this milestone, I am grateful to several luminaries in the blogosphere who encouraged me to continue throughout the long stretch when the numbers were not so promising. *sniff*

Thanks too to the aggregators who picked up my posts. Sweet!

Blogging; it’s cheaper than therapy.

P.S. Obviously, this is small beer in the global scheme of things, but it is _my_ beer ;-)Similar Posts:

Fix GrowlMail after 10.6.4 update

Tim Gaden — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 02:05:48 +0000

Most mail.app users will have noticed that OS updates can break their plugins and third-party bundles.

This happens because Apple now changes the UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) of Mail with every update, and requires plugins to match the new UUID each time in order to function. Thankfully, most developers are on the ball and provide updated versions of their plugins in good time.

GrowlMail, a notification plugin for mail.app that uses the Growl framework, fell prey to this problem after the 10.6.4 update.

If yours is broken, you can download a patched version of the plugin from the developer’s web site.

He also provides new plugin compatibility UUIDs that may bring other disabled bundles back to life.

Further help for other disabled plugins (like DockStar) is available in a macOSXHints tip .

UPDATE: 5 July 2010 A new version (1.2.2) of GrowlMail has been released, which is compatible with 10.6.4.mail.app, apple mail, plugins, growlmail, growl, notificationSimilar Posts:

Hawk Wings gets iPhone-friendly

Tim Gaden — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:04:35 +0000

Hawk Wings looks as good on an iPhone as it does on a Mac.

Thanks to the magic of WordPress plugin WPtouch Pro , you can now use your iPhone to read, browse and search Hawk Wings with ease.

The new layout also works with Palm, Android, Blackberry and other smart phones.

You can access the search function via the icon in the top righthand corner of the title bar.

There you will find options to search the site, or browse it by tag, keyword and category.

The new layout also helps Hawk Wings to look nice when accessed from an iPhone RSS reader app like Reeder . Which is nice.

Now all Hawk Wings needs is some new content to read!

[Hat tip to Mr Bell. Thanks.]hawkwings, iphone, wordpress, not apple mail, not mail.appSimilar Posts:

Apple Mail’s market share increases by 21%

Tim Gaden — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 23:38:12 +0000

Apple Mail’s popularity is on the rise. Its market share increased by 21% in 2009, from 7.64% to 9.69%, according to the latest survey by email marketing company CampaignMonitor.

Over the same period, the iPhone and iPod touch captured 8.69% of the market.

One caveat: the results of the survey are based on email image displays. As the company notes, this can skew results in favour of clients that display images by default (like Outlook 2000 and the iPhone) and penalise clients that block images by default (like Outlook 2007 and Gmail).

Nonetheless, the survey’s findings are striking.

The Outlook juggernaut continues to lead the pack, although its share fell by 2.78% in 2009.

Gmail, so central to the email experience of techno-pundits, only accounts for 5.74% of the market overall.

1.31% of users still crank up Lotus Notes to read their emails. Who knew?

CampaignMonitor helpfully summarises the main winners and losers:

But how many people open how much of their email how often on their smart phones rather than on a laptop or desktop? Apart from the iPhone’s glowing performance, the survey doesn’t say.

The survey presents a snapshot of the market in January 2010, and is based on a sample size of more than half-a-billion image displays. mail.app, apple mail, email, gmail, iphone, apple, microsoft outlook, lotus notesSimilar Posts:

Script to integrate MailTags with Evernote

Tim Gaden — Tue, 18 May 2010 05:44:23 +0000

Hawk Wings reader Nic Plum has written an AppleScript that helps MailTags and Evernote play nicely together.

The script sends a selected email to your Evernote Inbox as a note, importing any MailTags keywords as Evernote tags in the process.

As a result he works with one set of tags across Mail.app and Evernote, and doesn’t have to double-handle nearly as much.

He has made the script available on sourceforge, and welcomes comments and feedback.

The download includes a comprehensive guide on how to install and use the script.

Mail.app users who don’t use MailTags can still import emails into Evernote and get a productivity boost by tagging them with an AppleScript described in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

mail.app, applescript, evernote, productivity, apple mail, mailtagsSimilar Posts:

Why Email isn’t going away any time soon

Tim Gaden — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:21:04 +0000

Adam Engst, the editor of TidBITS, has written a thoughtful piece, summarising the many reasons why email still rules the roost.

Along the way, he considers what to make of the current “email is dead” meme, how to assess objectively the impact of the facebook phenomenon, why Gen Z (or whatever we are up to) still needs its email addresses, the innovative nature of Gmail’s design and also hazards a guess at what Google Wave might mean.

It’s worth reading. Check it out at TidBITS: “Why Email Remains the King of Internet Communications” email, social networking, facebook, google wave, gmail, internetSimilar Posts:

Secrets Updated for Snow Leopard

Tim Gaden — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:43:55 +0000

Secrets, a clever little System Preference Pane that makes tweaking “hidden” features of Mac OS X easy (see earlier Hawk Wings post for more), has been updated to 1.0.6 and is now compatible with Snow Leopard.

Secrets provides easy assess to many of Mac Os X’s settings that you can otherwise only change by messing around in Terminal with long command strings, which is not everyone’s cup of tea.

It includes tweaks for many Mac core and a wide range of third-party apps. The most popular tweaks across all the apps are listed separately as well.

Of course, here we are most interested in its options for Mail.app:

Secrets Mail Preferences

As you can see from the screenshot, Secrets allows you to

specify a default BCC email address
force Mail to display messages in plain text
set the Bundle compatibility and enable bundles
enable and disable the data detectors
switch the new (annoying) Snow Leopard behaviour of including names in copied email addresses on and off
set a sent mail sound
specify a minimum for HTML messages and a preferred text encoding
request read receipts
set the interval for refreshing Mail’s RSS feeds
Decide whether to display attachments inline or not.

And more.

Some people will think of it as a hack and might be wary. However it comes with the reassurance that Alcor, the developer also (once) behind Quicksilver, is its creator. That’s a strong pedigree.

Secrets is freeware and available from the Blacktree web site .

UPDATE: I read on TUAW that the Blacktree site is overloaded. Secrets is also available from the app’s page on code.google.com. secrets, preferences, hidden preferences, terminal, mail.app, apple mail, tweaks, tips, bundlesSimilar Posts:

Christmas Stationery for Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:16:37 +0000

equinux, purveyors of fine HTML stationary for Mail.app, has released a new collection of Christmas stationery templates in plenty of time for the festive season.

“Season’s Greetings Vol. 2″ contains templates offering Christmas greetings, invitations, wishlists for your kids to send to Santa, templates for one of those much-loved “annual news-roundup” emails.

Kwanzaa and Hanukkah are not forgotten. Templates are included for those festivals too.

For those not in the know, Apple Mail’s stationery feature allows the app to send pre-made HTML emails, often quite fancy. Many of the equinux templates allow for customization by the insertion of your own photos and user-definable fonts:

The pack costs €7,95 (c. USD 11.80) and is available from equinux’s web site where you can also see the company’s other stationery packs.

If you are keen on this kind of thing, and know that your friends don’t mind receiving them, but you don’t want to shell out money for the option, you will find some freeware seasonal stationery templates listed in the following, previous Hawk Wings posts:

1. Plugin List adds 122 Leopard Mail Templates.

2. More Mail Stationery, for sale and for free.

[via macnews.de ]stationery, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, addons, Christmas, hanukkah, Kwanzaa, festive season, more bandwidth-sucking tomfoolerySimilar Posts:

Canadian Stamp Icon. Old School!

Tim Gaden — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:15:38 +0000

Hawk Wings reader Richard Drdul sends an image of a very Old School Canadian postage stamp, drawn up as a Mail stamp icon.

It is, he tells me, Canada’s first ever postage stamp issued in 1851, and was designed by Sir Sandford Fleming, who also invented time zones.

It was also the first official postage stamp in the world to picture an animal.

The postmark reads “Greetings from Upper Canada,” which is what the province of Ontario (where Apple’s Canadian HQ is) used to be called.

You can download the original PNG file or the ICNS file here.

Changing the icon itself is easy. (UPDATE: Unless you are using Snow Leopard, in which case it is not so easy, but can still be done. I’ll post a a Snow Leopard guide tonight.)

I’ve added it to the list of alternative stamp icons for Mail.app, making a total now of 509.

[Thanks, Richard]mail.app, apple mail, icons, stamp icons, hacksSimilar Posts: