Some people are unhappy with the way Mail.app truncates the names of attachments so that you can’t quite see at a glance what you are clicking on.

They think, in turn, that it’s discourteous to do this to others.

Attaché is the utility for them. It is an AppleScript that provides full information in the body of the email for all enclosed attachments.

Put it in your Dock or on your Desktop (or wherever you can find it easily).

Drop some emails on the applet and it packages them up so that it’s clear at once what the recipient is getting:

The applet allows you to set a number of default parameters.

Open up the app and you are greeted with a Preferences pane that let’s you specify a default language (English, German, French, Italian).

I’ve blogged this before, but the author has now added additional preferences. You can now set the account that Mail will use to compose the message and pick a default signature.

Further options allow you to set a default subject and to import text to form the default body of the message.

This will appeal especially to knowledge workers (like me) who spend a lot of time shunting documents and whatnot around from one place to another, although others who want or need to identify attachments more closely in their emails will like it too.

Attaché is freeware. It was created by Martin Michel, who hopes soon to add the ability to zip files dropped on the applet and to set default recipients. It is available from its own page on MacScripter.

mail.app, apple mail, attachments, full text, productivity, civility, applescript

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”. mail.app, apple mail, rich text, webkit?, plain text, dock, attachments, bug, signatures

Loki Software has released an updated version of its Mail Attachments Iconizer plugin for Mail.app, an add-on that offers much greater control over the way that attachments are displayed and packaged.

I could type out all the benefits which the plugin offers, but thankfully the developers have knocked up their own chart of improvements:

The new version adds some welcome features — a new option to always display full attachment names, the ability to images in HTML layouts of incoming messages in LEopard Mail, the printing of attachments according to how they are currently displayed on the screen and better recognition of images without filename extension.

It also offers a more reliable fix of interaction with the stationery feature in Leopard Mail.

Mail Attachments Iconizer is shareware (USD 14.99) is available from the developer’s web site .plugins, leopard mail, apple mail, mail.app, attachments, productivity

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.

leopard mail, mail.app, apple mail, attachments, bugs

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. mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, tiger mail, bugs, attachments, button, counterintuitive or what?

Adam Nohejl at Lokiware has updated his plugin which manages the way Apple Mail displays attachments.

As well as redesigning the plugin so that offers better control of how attachments are handled, he has also tweaked it for Leopard.

Mail Attachment Iconizer 2.0 offers several improvements over Mail.app’s native attachment handling. It offers particular advantages for people who often receive large PDF or PostScript files:

Using the new Preference Pane in Mail’s Preferences, you can determine exactly how attachments will behave. For example, you could choose to see PDFs inline, but Bitmap images as icons, or vice-versa:

You can also opt to set the content so that the recipient of your email sees it in the way you want.

Mail Attachment Iconizer is shareware (USD 14.99, discounts for owners of MAI 1.0) and is available from Adam’s web site attachments, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, pdf, icons, productivity

After watching a work colleague manually adding attachments to a Mail.app message, Martin Michel decided that there must be a better way.

And he made one. He has created Attaché, an AppleScript droplet that quickly creates an new email, with all the attachments dropped on it included and listed.

Just dump it on your Desktop (or wherever you like to keep droplets–in the Dock, perhaps). Select the files you want to send and drop them onto it.

Hey presto – an email with attachments and a list of what’s included:

If my life was full of industrial quantities of attachments, I can see how this would save a lot of time indeed.

It will also please people like Jonathan, who emailed recently with a particular attachments problem:

One thing that frustrates us is that when adding attachments the attachment name is always truncated for longer names. As we have to print a record copy of the email, and all our documents include a date at the end It is impossible to see the proper name of the email attachment. Is their a way to make it add attachment name in plain text, or not truncate?

Mail’s default behaviour is annoying. But the list that this droplet generates solves his problem. Nice!

Martin plans to add further features, zipping of the attachments, default recipients and subjects and more.

Of course, you can always drag files to the Mail icon in the Dock or use the proxy icon (as described in a recent Macworld tip ) which is good enough for me.

Attaché is freeware and available from his web site .mail.app, apple mail, attachments, applescript, droplet, productivity, quickly batch and send, lists