An email marketer tested the new .Mac webmail interface and didn’t like what he found. His “marketing emails” are screwed by the way in which the new web interface handles CSS.

The old interface did a good job, he remembers. It “had amazing support for CSS and standards-based markup”.

But the new client wraps the whole email in a new DIV container:

This process is obviously aimed at foiling any modifications to the .Mac GUI caused by the use of type selectors. And if properly executed it would not impact the appearance of the source email. However, .Mac adds a gratuitous DIV just inside the new #messageCanvas DIV, consequently rendering all CSS useless…

As a result, direct marketers are faced with a dilemma:

So the result is that we’re at an impasse with .Mac: either we support other clients or we support .Mac. The former is the obvious choice, leaving us with .Mac emails looking like those rendered in Gmail and Hotmail. Bummer.

Or not.

(Hawk-eyed readers will notice that a coding work-around for this is presented in the comments to the original post.).Mac, dotmac, webmail, interface, CSS, direct marketing, standards

The poster at The Spam Chronicles is looking at how various programs and services handle (or don’t handle) spam.

First off, he compares Mail and Thunderbird by testing how well they process 109 spam emails released from his Gmail account.

The junk controls on both clients were reset at the start of the test.

He discovered that Mail flagged 42 of them as spam and missed 67 for a 39% success rate. Thunderbird faired better: it flagged all 109 as spam when its junk mail controls were run on the Inbox.

He them tried again with 61 spam emails from his Yahoo account and found that Mail.app “flagged 23 as spam while delivering 17 to the inbox for a 56% success rate” while Thunderbird again flagged them all when its filter was run on the Inbox.

He concludes:

Apple Mail starts with a more conservative approach in order to avoid falsely flagging e-mail as spam. In Apple Mail the spam filter is on my default. Thunderbird starts off with an aggressive filter but the spam filter is off by default and must be enabled.

Of course, this is not a neutral statistical sample sound for all eternity, nor is it fair to judge the clients on untrained filters, but the result is still interesting.

In another post he compares how a wider variety of web-based and Desktop email clients handled a week of spam, covering Yahoo!, .Mac’s webmail, Gmail, AOL, Apple Mail, Thunderbird and more.

There he finds out that on “the first day Apple Mail caught 10 and missed 10 junk mails. After that initial training it improved dramatically catching 6 and missing 1.”

For .Mac, he makes a perceptive observation: “.Mac mail does not have any web based spam filter, at least not visible to the user”. Nonetheless, “typically, only 1/2 the junk email appeared in my mailbox”.mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, email, spam, junk, gmail, aol, yahoo, dotmac, .Mac

A Hawk Wings reader emailed me today with a depressing tale.

The Address Book had been wiped from her (or his) PowerBook, smartphone and .Mac account after syncing the Powerbook with a Nokia 6682, except for three contacts recently added through the new .Mac interface.

A rather weird email exchange with .Mac support followed, before a fix was found independently.

The names of the reader and the .Mac support person and the support ticket numbers have been removed.

The Hawk Wings reader contacted .Mac support:

Hello,

I recently sync’ed my .Mac account with my Address Book on my PowerBook G4, and all my contacts were erased, but for the three I had recently added via the .Mac website.

I can be contacted by email at Xxxxxxx@mac.com or by phone at x xxx xxx xxxx. Please let me know ASAP how to fix this, as this is a very, very serious problem, with heavy consequences for me.

Thank you
Xxxxx X Xxxxxxx

.Mac response:

Dear Xxxxxxx,

Thank you for contacting Apple and the .Mac Support Team. Based on the information provided in your email, I understand that your Address Book contacts disappeared after syncing with .Mac.

I’m sorry to hear that some of your data is missing, but data lost through .Mac Sync cannot be recovered.

.Mac Syncing is not designed to back up data, such as Address Book contacts or Safari Bookmarks. I recommend using an application designed specifically for data backup, such as .Mac’s Backup.

Backup allows you to automatically save photos, family movies, your favorite music, and other important documents to your iDisk, a CD, a DVD, or an external hard disk. This will lessen the possibility of losing any important messages or data in the future.

You can also save your important files to CD, DVD, or other removable media using Mac OS X instead of Backup, as described in these articles:

Mac OS X: How to back up and restore your files

How to back up and restore your important Mac OS X 10.4 files

Sincerely,

Xxxxxxx
.Mac Support

Puzzled, another attempt is made:

Let me clarify: I know .Mac syncing is not design to back up data. But I don’t think it’s designed to erase it, is it?

I do not sync my Address Book with my .Mac account and my cell phone in order to back it up. I do it, just as most of your customers, in order to be able to use the same contact info on my Mac at home, on my PC at work and on my smartphone on the go.

This “glitch” has caused an extremely severe damage to the personal use I make of .Mac, as well as to my professional practice. That is why I very strongly encourage Apple to make sure this never happens again to me, or to any other .Mac subscriber. This is an advice I am giving both as a faithful Apple customer and as an attorney at law.

Should this happen again, not only would I lose any confidence in Apple’s .Mac service — I would also probably consider seeking reparation.

Cordially,
Xxxxxx X Xxxxxxx

.Mac Support replies:

Dear Xxxxxxx,

I apologize for any inconvenience that this issue might have caused. Based on the information in your latest email, it appears you might be using iSync rather than .Mac Sync.

I have forwarded your report to a .Mac Support specialist for assistance. After the matter has been investigated, a .Mac Support representative will respond to you with additional information.

I’m sorry for the inconvenience, and I appreciate your patience as we work to make your experience with .Mac more enjoyable.

Sincerely,

Xxxxxx
.Mac Support

Fortunately, the reader did not have to rely on .Mac support in the end.

The solution, using Address Book’s AddressBook.data.previous backup, emerged in a forum thread he started, basically following this macOSXHint tip for restoring lost contacts.

[Thanks, Xxxxxx]address book, .Mac, dotmac, syncing, backup, isync, support, erased, solution

Apple has updated four new technotes for users of its revamped webmail interface.

In brief:

1. Firefox issues when sending mail — Firefox can unexpectedly quit when sending an .Mac webmail message with a large attachment.
2. Entourage folder accents convert to HTML — The webmail interface converts Entourage folders with accents into HTML tags. Advice: Don’t use accents.
3. Scrollbar issues when expanding the Address Book — The interface doesn’t draw scrollbars for an expanded correctly when using the two-pane view.
4. Ways to use the online Address Book to create new messages — Two ways to use the online Address Book to create a new message. And one thing not to do.

.mac, dotmac, apple, technotes, firefox, entourage, accents, address book, interface

A poster on macOSXHints has posted a tip to reduce the long delays in producing a reply window that sometimes occur in Mail.

He suggests that it caused by settings in the Keychain and provides a work-around to fix it.

I had this problem earlier in the year. In my case, it wasn’t caused by Keychain settings, but by my .Mac account.

I won’t repeat it all here, but you can read the whole saga in “Apple Mail phones home too” where you will also find the fix.

In short, Mail was trying to connect through port 80 to verify my iChat certificate. My work firewall blocks port 80. Hence the delay.

Interesting that Mail phones home in an unannounced but benign way, don’t you think? mail.app, apple mail, dotmac, .Mac, iChat, certificate, keychain, bugs

Apple has made a rare (and welcome) proactive move. It’s offering some advice to .Mac users currently experiencing a rash of annoying “enter your password” alerts in Apple Mail.

The solution is to take the account offline by clicking the “Cancel” option in that dialog and then taking the account back online again, which somehow out-foxes the problem. If not, the statement suggests, quitting Mail and restarting it will.

The post on Apple’s web site was made by someone described as a “.Mac moderator” which surprised me. I thought that Apple sacked all its discussion board staff ? Perhaps “hosts” and “moderators” are different things.

The note is a few days old and the problem seems to be persisting , but the .Mac Team is working on it.

[I've been getting them on and off, but do you think that I could get one while waiting for a screenshot for this post? No.]

[Via MacUser ]mail.app, apple mail, .Mac, outage, error message, entering password again and again, honesty is the best policy, tips

While .Mac has come in for (mostly) justified criticism in recent months (e.g. here, here, here and here), I noticed an improvement worth celebrating last night.

Three months ago during a rash of .Mac outages, downtime was handled quite differently by Fastmail (rare, detailed outage explanations, fast response) and .Mac (frequent, vague or incomplete outage explanations, lagging response).

Now things are much better. My .Mac mail was down last night. A visit to .Mac’s system status alerts showed much improved descriptions of what was wrong and how many people it was affecting.

I’m happy to bag .Mac when it deserves it, but I think that small advances like this are worth highlighting too.

It did start me wondering though. How many people does 2% of .Mac users actually represent? dotmac, apple mail, mail.app, .mac, outages, system status