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, triviaSimilar Posts:

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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:

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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.
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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?

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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, emailSimilar Posts:

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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.Similar Posts:

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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.

Steve Job’s welcome email shows that NeXTMail contains all the basics of the Mail 2.0 interface — message list and preview windows, toolbar, sophisticated treatment of graphics and full support for RTF. In fact, it predated MIME, the international standard that governs virtually all email communication today, and was based on a message format of its own. Don Yacktman remembers that for all its beauty, communication with the outside world could be awkward: “If you didn’t have NeXTMail yourself and got a rich message, it was pretty obnoxious. (Rich messages were sent as an RTFD file that was tarred up, compressed, and uuencoded — .tar.Z.uu)”.

NeXTMail on the NeXTSTEP Workspace shows the origin of more Mail 2.0 features:

Here you see LipService and X-faces in action (see more below), the free-floating NeXTSTEP app-specific menu in the top left, the likwise free-floating mailbox list, and the NeXTSTEP Address Book. (Note too the “Father of the Dock” in the top right of the screen).

Some NeXTMail preference panes give a further sense of the app’s abilities:

Surprisingly, especially in a world where software bloat is all too common, some of the things that NeXTMail could do are missing from Mail 2.0. John Kheit lists three of them:

• LipService (this was a system wide service that was part of the app/sound kit (today’s Cocoa)). Click a lips icon (next to compose icon) and talk into the built in mic. It records and adds your recording as an attachment. The attachment is an icon of a pair of lips (see the first screenshot above). Click on it and play.
• Read receipt ability. The ability to set receive and read receipts. The ability to send receipts or purposefully not send them (via a hidden pref setting).
• Plug-in architecture that allowed for mailfaces. It set up a universal database and ability to have mail icons from anyone that wanted to participate.

Developers have tried to replace these missing features — iSay and MailVoiceClip for LipService, MailPriority for read receipts (doesn’t work in Tiger), MailPictures for X-images-URL and pictures of senders not in your Address Book — but the decision to remove them in the first place is puzzling.

Despite this, Don Yacktman points out that (some) things have changed for the better:

On the whole, I really like what Mail.app can do these days. Don’t forget that it can also do a lot of things the original Mail.app never did. The anti-spam and filtering features are huge improvements. NeXTMail also had fewer options for connecting to mail servers, no ability for multiple .sig files, piss-poor message quoting abilities (needed plugins to make it bearable) and so on. On the whole, while a few NeXTMail features may be missing, what we have in OS X today is much, much better. That is not to say that there isn’t plenty of room for improvement, though. Apple should keep making it better. And I think it is hugely annoying that Apple isn’t yet supporting an official API for plugin writers.

With thanks to John Kheit and Don Yacktman, who answered queries, offered pointers and opinions and provided some of the screenshots.

Hawk Wings is interested in the Prehistory of Apple Mail and welcomes any reminiscences, opinions or information on the journey from NeXTMail to Mail 2.0.3. Got some?NeXTMail, NeXTSTEP, mail.app, apple mail, return receipts, x-faces, history, address book, history of apple mailSimilar Posts:

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TUAW claims it looks like SoundJam, which was before my time. macnews.net.tc doesn’t like it.

I don’t know what it means, but it’s interesting.

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It is a Red-tailed Hawk, Buteo jamaicensis, which ranges over most of the North American Continent. Its call, a two to three second rasping will be well-known to anyone who has watched a Western. Or so I read in a posting on the Mac Net Journal.

By all accounts it is an aggressive bird, vigourously defending its territory against intruders. Luckily, its diet is composed almost entirely of small rodents. You can read more about these magnificent birds, as I did, on the Desert USA and U.S. Geological Survey web sites.Similar Posts:

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