Mail.app has a curious feature, which is interesting if not immediately useful.

If you put a URL in the Subject line of an email, and some text in the body of the message, Webkit (or whatever handles the text in Mail) turns it into hyperlink.

As pointed out in a tip on MacOSXHints , it doesn’t work if you leave the body of the message blank.

The result is a clickable subject in the delivered email:

It’s not clear to me how users could make use of this behaviour, especially since you need to put text in the body of the email to trigger the parsing, text which might as well be the URL itself.

Still, it’s something to blog about ;-) mail.app, apple mail, webkit, text, url, oddity, trivia

Danish blogger Henrik Kramshøj has posted a very impressive screenshot of Activity Viewer in overdrive, in the process of writing 30,077 changes to disk.

As far as I can tell (thanks, InterTran ) the burst of activity was caused by changing internet service providers and email addresses at the same time:

Today sweat my laptop by one long-winded disk by that synchronization whole bulk item, because I’ve switched internetudbyder, addresses and tænkte it was pÃ¥ the time that bulldoze awhile up.

Machines are not about to make human translators obsolete any time soon.

Still, the picture is worth a thousand words in any language:

mail.app, apple mail, trivia, activity viewer, the labours of Hercules, caches, writing changes to disk

I noticed yesterday that 40% of the plugins and addons on the Hawk Wings Top Ten list — MailTags, Mail Act-on, Mail Stamps, Spell Catcher X — are created by developers living in Canada.

Even if you count MailTags and Mail Act-on as one, that’s still 30% or almost a third.

Obviously Canada is a terrific country (maple syrup, Mounties, lacrosse, etc), but this seems extraordinary to me.

I wonder why. Is it simply the energy created as a result of being overshadowed by a powerful neighbour? Is the market penetration of Macs in Canada greater? Or is it just coincidence?

A puzzle.

On 9 September 1947, a US Navy technician fixed a fault in a Harvard Mark II computer by extracting a moth that was caught between the contacts of a relay in the system.

This well-documented event (you can see the log report complete with moth sticky-taped to it here) is often thought to be the origin of the terms, “bug” and “debug“, in reference to computer problems, something even Mail.app suffers from time to time.

But it’s not true.

According to Michael Quinion’s Port Out, Starboard Home and Other Language Myths (Penguin, 2005), this use of bug is much older.

He cites a report in the Pall Mall Gazette from 1889 about the inventor Thomas Edison:

Mr Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering a ‘bug’ in his phonograph — an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.

And he suggests that it might be even older. An electrical handbook published in 1896 mentions that the term was first used jokingly by telegraph operators to explain that noisy lines were caused by insects invading the telegraph wires.

The legacy of nineteenth century proto-phone-phreakers?

(Holiday reading).

A German Mac user has posted what he says is a screenshot of Mail.app‘s notification badge after your unread mail count reaches a certain number.

I’ve never seen this myself. I wonder what level of negligence is required before you see it.trivia, mail.app, apple mail, notification, badge, joke, unread emails, email

It’s been five weeks since my last self-indulgent “Hawk Wings Stats” post. So another one is perhaps OK.

Yesterday Hawk Wings served its 500,000th page. The number of pages served to Iceland has increased fourfold.

Also, over the last five weeks, Hawk Wings somehow moved up from 90,216 to 51, 816 in Technorati‘s rankings.

A big thanks to you for reading, commenting and for linking. And to Alternative Web Services who hosts Hawk Wings and has generously provided some extra bandwidth to keep the site ticking over. Thanks.

One final stat. Today is my two year “switchaversary”. I still have a crystal-clear memory of the afternoon my PowerBook arrived at work. The weight. The style. The unpacking ritual. The smell. The startup chime. Opening my own copy of Mail.app for the first time.

The mail client we know and love has a long history. It was written from scratch for NeXTSTEP, the operating system created by NeXT Inc, a company Steve Jobs founded in 1985 and which was bought up by Apple in 1996.

Known as NeXTMail or simply Mail.app, it was a powerful and fully-featured program, more powerful than its descendant Mail 2.0 in some ways, although less powerful in others.

The importance of NeXTMail for OS X’s Mail.app is clear at once from a screenshot of NeXTMail’s interface:

Read on to take a look at Apple Mail in its early years, see what it could do, and hear what some people remember about using it.

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