Savaging Mail’s sending silliness
Friday, March 2nd, 2007
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.
