Although my own experience of the 10.4.7 update and Mail.app has been completely trouble-free, not everyone has been so lucky. MacUser carries a good summary of some general problems.

MacInTouch has a collection of readers’ reports about problems following the recent update. Almost all of them mention Mail. The posters either have problems or are just disillusioned like this one:

It’s been how many years now, that Mail has been out? How many updates to the OS, and still, *still* Apple has not fixed the problem that Mail has wrt long URIs: It breaks them in such a way that only Mail seems to be able to handle. Users of other Mail software are unable to click on the resulting links.

With the 10.4.7 update, they’ve certainly addressed some bugs in Mail, but this is STILL not one of them. I think the argument can be made that it’s more serious than some of the ones they have fixed.

I’ve reported this bug several times to Apple, as have my colleagues, but maybe we need a more public rant.

I don’t think that Apple will “fix” this problem. The “delsp=yes” flag that triggers this behaviour (read more about it in an earlier Hawk Wings post) is well-documented in the RFC standard.

Apple (I imagine) doesn’t think this is a bug in Mail.app. It’s the rest of the world that lags behind, and we Mail users must wait for other email clients to catch up.

We just have to take the taunts of our non-Mail-using buddies on the nose, or use one workaround or another in the meantime.mail.app, apple mail, 10.4.7, problems, bugs, frustrations, broken URLs, delsp=yes, RFC

Tom Van Vleck, who worked on the Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) system in modern computing’s prehistory, has written a history of email and early adventures in instant messaging.

Here you can read about the very beginnings of email in the CTSS project at MIT, the birth of ARPANet and its contribution to email and Ray Tomlinson‘s “invention” of the @ sign as an addressing convention.

It also contains a link to Brad Templeton’s History of Spam .email, history, spam, ARPANet, Multics, CTSS, RFC