Paul Westbrook spent Thanksgiving using Mail.app on a dialup connection. The slower speed helped him to notice three problems with the way Apple Mail implements IMAP.

Pierre Igot at Betalogue has discovered a design flaw in the way Mail.app handles replies that “illustrates Apple’s lack of concern for people with dial-up Internet connections”:

In that particular situation, when you select a message that contains attachments and hit the “Reply” button or press Command-R to create a reply to that particular message, if your Internet connection happens to be saturated, then Mail takes an abnormally long time to open the window with the new reply. I am talking about 10 seconds or more.

OneClick is an AppleScript that automates the process of establishing an internet connection, sending and checking for mail in Mail.app.

It eliminates lots of button clicking and waiting, especially for dial-up users. When I am at the beach house and restricted to dial-up, I have often wished for something like this.

The developer outlines what the script does:

If you haven’t got Mail running, it first loads it. Then if you’re not online, it dials (& re-dial as necessary) and connects, third checks for your email, fourth disconnects and finally reports the results. And all with… one click! If you’re already online, OneClick can tell and skips the Internet connection step, everything else is the same.

It integrates with iCal to enable you to schedule when mail should be checked.

A new version released today can toggle Mail’s Activity Viewer on and off during the check and send process.

Oneclick is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site.

The disk images contains two version of the script, one with speech support and one without.