Hawk Wings » Betalogue

Savaging Mail’s sending silliness

Tim Gaden — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:30:59 +0000

Over at Betalogue, Pierre Igot, who has an eagle-eye for flaws in Apple’s user interface design, unloads on the behaviour of Mail’s Sent mail folder .

He points out:

Sending mail is a pretty essential process. When it comes to e-mail, it does not get much more basic than this. But for some reason, Mail 2.0â€™s user interface makes the process unnecessarily complicated and non-intuitive. The interface is OK (although still very inelegant) when things work as expected. But as soon as something fails, itâ€™s a disaster.

What really annoys him is the way that the label of the Sent mail folder changes to “Sending…” when outgoing mail is being processed.

It’s ugly, he says, and it’s stupid. If you click on the “Sending…” folder, it displays all your sent messages except the one that is currently being sent. So where is it?

That’s the heart of the interface design failure:

Itâ€™s not in the â€œSentâ€ box, as we have just seen. Itâ€™s no longer in the â€œDraftsâ€ box either…. So where is it? Well, thatâ€™s the kicker: It is nowhere. It is not in any visible part of the user interface in Mail. While the message is in the process of being sent, it effectively disappears from the user interface altogether and stays in some kind of UI limbo, until itâ€™s finally sentâ€”and then it miraculously reappears in the â€œSentâ€ box, as expected.

And don’t get him started on what happens next, especially if a message fails to send.

Read the whole post at Betalogue to find out how silly Mail is when that happens. mail.app, apple mail, Sent mail, sending, interface design, dumb dumb dumb, betalogue, bugsSimilar Posts:

Dotting the “i” in iCal

Tim Gaden — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 10:49:13 +0000

Pierre Igot at Betalogue has some of the sharpest eyes in the blogging world. He repeatedly sees flaws in interface design that I overlook. Whether it is problems with the way Mail handles the format=flowed feature or threading, he’s got it nailed.

He’s done it again with iCal, pointing out something that I must have looked at a hundred times and never “seen”.

Pierre notes iCal’s inability to modify its language when the the value in question is not plural (as in this screenshot of an iCal alarm). He wonders whether anyone at Apple uses iCal and has noticed that it needs to be fixed.

Of course, it’s not earth-shattering. Still, Apple is a company that takes pride in the polish of its apps, so it rankles as Pierre point out:

Yeah, I know, itâ€™s a detail. Itâ€™s not a bug. It doesnâ€™t cause iCal to crash. It doesnâ€™t cause iCal to fail to sound the alarm one hour before the event. So the problem is not high on anyoneâ€™s to-do list. But surely it is still somewhere on someoneâ€™s to-do list? And one day it will be fixed, right?

Now it will niggle at me too. ical, interface, alarms, apple, betalogue, Apple GUI, attention to detailSimilar Posts:

Mail.app: Threading, keyboard annoyances

Tim Gaden — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 15:30:54 +0000

It is impossible to go away from a post by Pierre Igot at Betalogue without learning something new. Two recent post are no exception.

He details several shortcomings in the way that Mail presents the user interface for threaded messages and in the method it uses to auto-select a first message to display when any given thread is expanded.

A second post expands on the problems , especially how keyboard shortcuts operate in normal and threaded views.

Several of the issues arise because of the way in which Pierre likes to use Mail:

I use Mail with the so-called â€œmessage areaâ€ pane closed. In other words, my main mail viewer window in Mail consists of the mailbox list on the left-hand side and the message list on the right-hand side. I donâ€™t have a third pane at the bottom displaying the contents of the currently selected message. I donâ€™t like that, because when that â€œmessage areaâ€ pane is visible, any message in the message list becomes marked as read as soon as you select it, whether you actually want to read it or not.

People who use Mail in the same way will find the second post especially interesting.betalogue, mail.app, apple mail, keyboard shortcuts, bugs, threading, messages, preview pane
Similar Posts:

User interface flaws in iCal

Tim Gaden — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 23:36:41 +0000

At Betalogue, Pierre Igot offers a demolition job on iCal’s user interface.

He points out a number of problems in design and operation with its text fields, contextual menus and information drawer.

I’ve been using iCal for two years now (since switching) and already I’ve become harden to these problems — I unconsciously work around them, I think it’s normal, I don’t see them at all anymore, if I ever did. But Pierre does.ical, user interface, bugs, alarms, betalogue, text fields, problems Similar Posts:

Talking Mail.app: Pierre Igot

Tim Gaden — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 14:11:38 +0000

Pierre Igot is a professional translator, writer, and Mac technical support person living in southwest Nova Scotia, Canada. He maintains his own web site of literature, music, and visuals at http://www.latext.com and his own blog at http://www.betalogue.com.

His primary home office machine is a Power Macintosh G5 Quad with 4.5 GB of RAM and two 500 MB Seagate hard drives, used with a dual-monitor setup consisting of an Apple Cinema HD 30″ display and an older Apple Cinema HD 23″ display. He uses all kinds of software in his daily computing activities, including Mac OS X 10.4, Mail, Safari, NetNewsWire, iTunes, iPhoto, GarageBand, Pages, Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite 2, BBEdit, FileMaker Pro, etc.

HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?

PI: I switched from Eudora to Mail via Mailsmith in August 2002. I even wrote an article about the adventure at the time.

Basically, I was a long-time Eudora user, but had become disappointed with the lack of progress of the Mac OS X version. The program was in endless beta mode, there were lots of glitches, many core Mac OS X features were not supported, etc. Since I was also a long-time user and fan of Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit (mostly for web site authoring), I figured I would give Mailsmith , their e-mail client, a try.

I was thoroughly disappointed by Mailsmith. There was no integration with Mac OS X’s Address Book (at the time), and its own address book was really poor. (It didn’t even distinguish between first name and last name, forcing you type the names in reverse order to make sure they would be properly alphabetized!) But it had rather impressive filtering capabilities. I was willing to live with the flaws, but the deal breaker was the program’s performance, which was simply unacceptable.

I was also very wary of using a program where my entire e-mail archive was stored in a single (huge) database file. That was one of the primary reasons why I never even considered switching to Microsoft’s Entourage, even though I owned a copy of it as part of Microsoft Office. (As a long-time Microsoft Word user, I am also all too aware of the poor quality of Microsoft’s software for the Mac in general. I know that Entourage is supposed to be better, but on the handful of occasions where I actually tried using the program, I wasn’t particularly impressed. Things haven’t changed significantly since 2002 as far as I can tell.)

When I decided to switch to Mail, I was fully aware of its limitations. But there were too many benefits that outweighed the limitations: full Mac OS X integration with Address Book support, support for core Mac OS X features such as Quartz text smoothing, use of the “.mbox” file format for storing e-mail mailboxes, etc. And the price was nice too, of course.

I have been using Mail for nearly four years now, and, in spite of all the trials and tribulations, I haven’t regretted my choice. One thing I should emphasize for prospective switchers, however: If you want to switch from Eudora, make sure to use Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. I wasn’t aware of this application at the time, and ended up using the built-in import features in Mailsmith and then Mail to import my extensive archive of old e-mail. I am still living with the consequences of this process (badly encoded accented characters, HTML rendered as plain text, etc.) in some of my old e-mail.

HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?

PI: Mail Act-On is an essential add-on for me. I use it mostly to create keyboard shortcuts for moving e-mail messages to mailbox folders. It’s so much easier to press a keyboard shortcut such as control-A to move a message or group of messages to a mailbox folder buried several levels deep inside your mailbox folder hierarchy!

I used to have AppleScript scripts for this, but in Tiger, Mail no longer has its own Script menu, so you can no longer assign keyboard shortcuts to Mail-specific AppleScript scripts with the Keyboard Shortcuts feature in System Preferences. I still use some AppleScript scripts for Mail in the system-wide Script menu, but to me the switch to a system-wide Script menu for all AppleScript scripts, including application-specific scripts, was a major step back.

I should also mention Spell Catcher X. I’ve turned Mail’s own automatic address completion feature off (“Automatically complete addresses” checkbox in “Composing” preference pane) and use Spell Catcher’s automatic completion feature instead when composing messages in Mail. The only difference is that I have to press a keyboard shortcut (I use command-shift-F5) after typing the first few letters of a name in the “To:” or “Cc:” field. But Spell Catcher X’s automatic completion feature is much more flexible and powerful than Mail’s own.

Needless to say, I also make full use of Spell Catcher X’s spell checking and automatic glossary expansion features when typing text in the body of my e-mail messages. To me, it makes no sense to have one spell checker / glossary tool in Mail, and another one in Word, and another one BBEdit. It’s all text! I write about the same things in Word, Mail, and BBEdit. I want the same spell checker and glossary tool in all applications. Spell Catcher X offers that, and is invaluable.

HW: What’s your favourite thing about Mail.app?

PI: It’s hard to say. There are many times when I positively hate Mail, but then I think that it’s the same with all e-mail clients. I don’t think there is one e-mail client that is free of flaws and bugs and clearly above the rest.

But I would have to say that one of the main things that make me stick with Mail, in spite of all the flaws and frustration, is the tight integration with Mac OS X. It’s one of those cases where the fact that Apple provides the “full experience” (the system, the address book, the e-mail client) is a significant advantage. I like the full integration with Address Book (even via Spell Catcher X), I like the Quartz font smoothing, I like the overall user interface (although it too has its flaws, of course).

HW: What’s your pet hate about Mail.app?

PI: There are so many! But if I had to choose one, I would probably say the poor handling of low-bandwidth situations with a dial-up connection. If you have a slow dial-up connection like mine (I peak at approximately 30 kbps) and try to check your mail or send a message while Safari is loading a couple of web pages or downloading a large file, or even while Mail itself is receiving an e-mail with a large attachment, it’s a total nightmare. Mail takes some of your e-mail accounts offline without your permission, it fails to send queued messages which stay stuck in some kind of undefinable interface limbo, and worst of all, sometimes Mail actually interrupts everything with a modal dialog box telling you that your e-mail user name or password is incorrect and asking you to re-enter the password — even though the existing password is perfectly correct, of course! This is ridiculous.

A modal dialog box! In 2006! If Mail is in the background when this happens, the Mail icon starts bouncing endlessly in the Dock and you are pretty much forced to switch to Mail to dismiss the dialog box. (Don’t try re-entering your password. There is no point. There is nothing wrong with your existing password. It’s just that Mail is completely clueless about how to handle time-outs in low bandwidth situations with some mail servers.)

I have submitted countless bug reports to Apple about this. They have asked me to send transcripts of Mail’s interactions with the servers (which you can obtain by activating a logging feature in Mail through the Terminal). I have sent them the transcripts. As far as I can tell, they have never done anything to fix the problem. When I am downloading a large file and Mail is running in the background, I still get the modal dialog box, and the accounts going offline, etc. It is truly pathetic. Not everyone can get broadband access to the Internet! I live in an area where it’s simply not available, and I have no choice. There are many areas in Mac OS X where Apple completely ignores the needs of dial-up users. Mail is one of those.

HW: If you could tell the Apple Mail development team one thing, what would it be?

PI: Just one thing? It would have to be a very, very long sentence, then! I would try to cram as many bugs and flaws into it as possible! But if I really had to choose, I probably would raise the problem with dial-up connections described above on behalf of all dial-up users out there! Somebody has to still care about them.

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You can read other interviews with developers and Mac identities talking about their experience with Mail.app by following this tag cloud link.talking mail.app, likes, dislikes, mail.app, apple mail, Pierre Igot, BetalogueSimilar Posts:

Betalogue: Two more Mail.app annoyances

Tim Gaden — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 00:38:27 +0000

At Betalogue, Pierre Igot reports two more annoyances in Apple Mail:

Mail 2.0: ?¢‚Ç¨Àú0 messages, 3 unread?¢‚Ç¨‚Ñ¢ — By doing several complicated things at once, he brings Mail.app‘s multi-threading ability to its knees.

It shouldn’t happen, it shouldn’t be so hard to discover that the app has stalled and it shouldn’t be so difficult to unstick it.

This leads to some reflections on how Mail.app might be better designed so that things like this are more transparent for average users.

Mail 2.0: ?¢‚Ç¨ÀúUndo Mark as Junk?¢‚Ç¨‚Ñ¢ doesn?¢‚Ç¨‚Ñ¢t undo anything — Pierre has an email incorrectly-marked as Junk. If the Junk filter is on automatic, it will move the message to the Junk folder.
But going to the Junk folder and selecting the message to “un-junk it”, he notes that clicking the “Undo Mark as Junk” option in the Edit menu or selecting “Mark as Not Junk” from the Message menu doesn’t do anything.

I can’t reproduce this behaviour. When I do this, the message does get “un-junked”. And I guess that Apple Mail’s Spam database is updated in the background, but I agree it would be useful if Mail.app automatically restored the message to the mailbox from whence it came. (like Entourage does…Grrrr!!)

As always, excellent holiday reading!Similar Posts: