Apple’s Tiger Mail Discussion Board contains a few threads from people with IMAP problems in Mail, mostly saying that Mail hangs when checking IMAP accounts. The “I am checking your mail now” wheel next to the inbox turns very slowly or not at all and the app seems to freeze. Force Quitting is the only escape.

I read these reports with compassion, but with more compassion after it started to happen to me five or so days ago. My two IMAP accounts, one for work and one at my ISP, started to freeze up periodically. So I was overjoyed today to stumble on a tip from Roger Weeks at O’Reilly’s macdevcenter blog. He recommends typing “INBOX” (without the quotes) into the “IMAP Path prefix” field of the account’s Advanced Settings in Preferences.

I did this. It kicked all the other folders in one account out of a tree in the inbox where they had been displayed and put them further down the list of folders on the left under a grey globe of their own. No apparent change to the second IMAP account, but now the freezing problem seems to have done away.

A fix or a coincidence? I don’t know. What do you think?

The following comment left on Roger’s blog doesn’t sound promising:

Apple’s IMAP implementation still is seriously broken, as it cannot work with a namespace for public folders. In the IMAP world, there are several prefixes, one for personal folders, one for public folders, and one for folders of other users to which one may have access. Apple engineers have completely missed that point by providing only room for a single prefix. Just look at how Thunderbird handles that: three different prefix fields.

A reader emailed to ask if there was any way his daughter could request return receipts using Apple Mail on her new iMac. Knowing that MailPriority doesn’t work in Tiger’s version of Mail, I said no.

But today I stumbled across a work-around for this on the Apple Discussion forums, posted by Andreas Amann of Mailscript fame, and then discovered that the same tip has been posted independently at macOSXHints.

The hack involves adding a specific header – Disposition-Notification-To – to all your messages via the Terminal, and then optionally cutting and pasting some text into the Applescript editor to make a script to manage them.

Obviously, this has a major draw-back. It’s all or nothing. Either all your messages will ask for return receipts or none of them will. But for those who really need the feature, I guess it could be worth it.

UPDATE: See also, “An AppleScript to send return receipts in Mail.app”

Another way to solve the broken hyperlinks problem was right under my nose and I never noticed. Perhaps I’m not the only one.

You can embed a hyperlink in a Mail message, and the embedded link will then not break.

1. Highlight the text that you want to anchor the hyperlink, say, “click here” or “this web site”.
2. Control click on the highlighted text and select the “Edit Link…” option from the contextual menu
3. Enter the text of the link (paste it in if you have copied it to the clipboard)
4. Send.

The hyperlink then arrives in a form that works at the other end. This only works if the message is in Rich Text Format though. That’s a bit of a downer for old-fashioned emailers like me.

One way to solve the broken hyperlinks annoyance in Apple Mail 2.0 is to make your URLs and hyperlinks so short that they can’t break. A free service on the web called TinyURL can help you do this. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to the TinyURL web site – http://tinyurl.com.
2. Find the link to the little javascript applet on the front page which looks like this

onto the bookmarks bar of your browser (Safari in my case) like this:

3. Now whenever you want to send the hyperlink of a page you are browsing, click on the bookmark and it launches a new window with a short URL. For example, say you found a great tip for working around the broken hyperlink problem in Apple Mail. You click on the bookmark and it turns this URL

http://www.hawkwings.net/2005/08/08/broken-hyperlinks-work-around/

into this:

http://tinyurl.com/7gcjw

4. Cut and paste, or drag-and-drop the short URL – http://tinyurl.com/7gcjw (it does work. Click it and see!) – into your Mail message and you are done.

Now everyone can click on the links you send with ease. It’s not elegant, it’s not transparent, but it does work!broken hyperlinks, URLs, delsp=yes, mail.app, apple mail, workarounds, tinyURL