Hawk Wings reader Leonardo Burci emailed today to tell me something about Address Book and Mail.app that I didn’t know.

He writes:

Create a Group in Address Book. Add people containing valid e-mail addresses plus a person without an e-mail address or with an invalid e-mail address.

Create a new email. Choose your Group as recipient. Send. You get an error saying something like “mail could not be sent using server xyz, etc”. It doesn’t tell you the real reason why the email couldn’t be sent. It should.

Problem: a Group in the Address Book might consist of people and companies with and without e-mail addresses. This group might be used for sending letters, faxes and e-mail. Mail.app should handle such a recipient list intelligently.

Solution: Mail.app should inform the user about missing and invalid e-mail addresses and should give the user a choice whether to send the mail to the recipients with correct e-mail addresses or not. If you do send, it should give the user a list of people and companies that have no or invalid e-mail addresses and that were therefore excluded.

He’s right. This is not the behaviour of an Operating System that “just works”.