The new mail alert sound in Mail.app was broken when Leopard was released last year. Three updates later, and it’s still broken.

[UPDATE: In deference to posters in the comments below, I should point out that not everyone experiences this problem. It only affects most/many/some/a few users. Like me.]

Fortunately, there is a work-around which you can use until Apple gets around to fixing the problem. It’s a bit fiddly, but not too forbidding.

First download this zip file from Hawk Wings which contains an applescript and the default “new mail” audio file.

Unzip it, and place the audio file in your ~/Library/Sounds folder (where “~” is shorthand for your user directory).

Then open up the script in place the script in Script Editor. You will see that all it does is execute a shell script — do shell script "afplay /Users/timbo/Library/Sounds/NewMail.aiff > /dev/null 2>&1 &". You will need to edit it to replace the name of my user directory with yours.

Then save it in your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail folder. If you don’t have such a folder, it’s worth creating one.

Now you need to create a rule in Mail.app that triggers the script whenever a new email arrives.

Open up the Rules pane in Mail’s Preferences:

Create a new rule. Call it something creative like “New Mail Alert Work-around” and fill out the rest as per the screenshot. I like to restrict it to people who are in my list of previous senders–it’s a quick and dirty way to rule out being alerted to the arrival of spam. Obviously, there are other ways to select conditions here which restrict when the alert will be triggered.

Also, in the “Perform the following action” field, you will need to select “Run AppleScript”, then navigate to ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail and select the NewMailAlert.scpt that you saved there earlier.

All done. Send yourself a test email, and rejoice. Mail.app is talking to you again.

For extra spice you could use one of the hundreds of mail alert sounds listed at Email Gifs and Sounds (Or perhaps Scully is more your thing?) but have compassion on your work colleagues. That could get really annoying after a while.

[With thanks to the original posters in an Apple Discussion thread ]

Related posts

• Hiding to-dos in Leopard Mail
• Three outgoing mail fixes for Mac users on the go
• Scripts to automate the Mail.app Envelope speed trick
• Script to Show/Hide Preview Pane in Mail
• Script to send a Yojimbo item with Mail.app

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.

Related posts

• Leopard Mail’s stupid save attachments button
• A modest Leopard Mail wish-list
• Security flaw with scripts in Mail.app
• Mail Attachments Iconizer plugin gets smarter
• Leopard Mail development continues behind (mostly) closed doors

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.

Related posts

• Leopard Mail’s drag-n-drop double act (with MailTags)
• A modest Leopard Mail wish-list
• Smarter Searches in Leopard Mail
• Security flaw with scripts in Mail.app
• Security Bug back for Leopard Mail

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 2.0’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, it’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:

It’s not in the “Sent” box, as we have just seen. It’s no longer in the “Drafts” box either…. So where is it? Well, that’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 it’s finally sent—and then it miraculously reappears in the “Sent” 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.

Related posts

• Mail.app: Threading, keyboard annoyances
• The puzzle of extra returns in Mail.app replies
• Ten ways to make Mail.app better
• Talking Mail.app: Pierre Igot
• Security flaw with scripts in Mail.app

A poster in the realmac software forum, perhaps sitting rather loosely to whatever NDA he might have signed, offers a glimpse (UPDATE: The link is dead. The post is pulled) of continued development in Leopard.

He writes:

Just installed the newest release of Leopard. Nothing major just some bug fixes around the new mail app and other minor issues. There are some new firewall settings which seem to a very nice addition.

Since this is my first year as a developer and the first time I have been able to load pre-release software I can’t say at this point that it was a very good or bad decision. Per my previous posts Leopard is an evolution of Tiger and there really are not that many things, I feel, to get excited about for most users. The integration of the calendar with mail and to do is really nice and should give users of Entourage a run for their money.

I thought that stamping out bugs before a product’s release was a dying art, so that bit sounds good.

I don’t know any more. If you do, you had better keep it to yourself.

Sadly.

Related posts

• How Mail sucks (and .Mac webmail too)
• Snow Leopard Mail.app to be two thirds smaller!
• Security Bug back for Leopard Mail
• Leopard Mail’s stupid save attachments button
• Leopard Mail’s drag-n-drop double act (with MailTags)

Colin Devroe knows what he likes and doesn’t like about Mail.app, although he says that “I’m not as much of a power-user of Mail as I probably could be.”

He has produced a list of gripes and a modest list of wishes for Leopard Mail.

I see what he means when he asks for more flexible searching:

The search box should allow for multiple filters such as you find in the current Finder. Searching for a subject, then being able to click + to drill down until you find what you are looking for. I have about 12,500 pieces of email, and finding the 1 that I am looking for can sometimes prove difficult with a single search filter.

It would be great at the click of a Finder-like plus sign to search for emails from a particular sender with a particular word in the subject line:

That’s much easier than the Boolean search “hack” for Mail.

The complaint about smart mailboxes is also right on target. And well-observed; I’d not noticed it before.

When you create a smart mailbox and select “message is in mailbox” you get a list of your existing smart mailboxes. When you try to create a “message is not in mailbox” criterion, you don’t. Why not? He wants it fixed.

His modest feature requests — an iLife media browser and the automatic compression of multiple attachments — are not what I would choose, but it’s great to see someone thinking outside the box and coming up with features that add functionality not just eye-candy.

A fine post.

Related posts

• Leopard Mail’s stupid save attachments button
• Leopard Mail’s drag-n-drop double act (with MailTags)
• Smarter Searches in Leopard Mail
• Security flaw with scripts in Mail.app
• Mail Attachments Iconizer plugin gets smarter