On Apple Discussions Martin Marconcini has discovered a way to bring Mail.app to a screaming halt in three easy steps.

Frustrated by Mail’s tendency to freeze when he dragged anything onto Mail’s Dock icon, he went back and painstakingly restored his Mail installation step-by-step until the glitch re-emerged.

Here’s what he discovered (you can test it for yourself):

One: Set Mail’s New message default in the Composing preference pane to plain text.

Two: Add a signature to your email account in the Signatures Preference pane. Make sure that you select it at the bottom of the signature pane to be added to every new message by default:

Three: Drag an image or anything else onto Mail’s Dock icon.

That’s a big, 100%-repeatable train wreck for me.

It seems like a common configuration; it’s not restricted to dragging ClarisWorks documents onto the Dock icon when the signature contains a particular accented Laotian character. How does such a thing not emerge in internal testing? Perhaps I am too romantic about internal testing.

Anyway, happily, I am in the clear. All my signatures are just a few keystrokes away in TextExpander.

But Martin suggests some workarounds for those plagued by these freezes:

a) Use Rich Text (not an option if you use Blackberry or need plain text)
b) Use Plain Text but remove the signatures (can be a Pain In the A** if you use different business accounts like me with odd disclaimers that are a “must”).
c) Roll back to Safari 3.0.* and either use it or use Camino/Opera/Firefox/Etc. Could be a problem if you rely on Safari stuff like Inquisitor, 1Password, etc.
d) Don’t drag attachments to the dock icon…

On 8 April Apple acknowledged this as “a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering”. mail.app, apple mail, rich text, webkit?, plain text, dock, attachments, bug, signatures

Of course, there was only one real question of any importance during the Keynote yesterday: What email client is iPhone using?

Apple doesn’t call it Apple Mail in the same way as it calls the phone’s browser Safari. It describes the email app as,

…a rich HTML email client that fetches your email in the background from most POP3 or IMAP mail services and displays photos and graphics right along with the text.

Is it a stripped-down version of Apple Mail all done over with eye-candy or something else? What is “rich HTML”?

After watching the Keynote a few times and viewing the videos in the new iPhone section of the Apple web site, I think that that “rich HTML” is a term designed to appeal to Windows users. Mail.app users are used to the distinction between “Rich Text” and HTML email, and Mail’s ability to compose only in the former whilst happily displaying the latter.

There is nothing in the Keynote or videos to suggest anything more advanced (or depraved, depending on your point of view about HTML email) than Mail.app’s existing capabilities.

There is no composing in HTML and nothing on display that suggests more advanced HTML rendering. The only list I can see is marked with hyphens, not bullets, although presumably it wasn’t composed on an iPhone:

So I am guessing that is not a new custom-made client but a cut-down version of Mail.app, “Mail Mobile” as it were. What do you think?

Australians won’t get their hands on one until sometime in 2008, so someone else will know the answer before I do. mail.app, apple mail, iphone, mwsf, keynote, html, rich text, email client

Melvin Rivera has written an excellent illustrated tutorial on how to create a CSS signature in Mail.app.

He provides detailed instructions and a sample template, from which you can quickly create a signature of your own:

Of course, this will only work if you are happy to operate in Rich Text format. If you are an old-fashioned plain texter (like me), this tip is not for you.

UPDATE: Melvin has updated his post with some extra information on how Gmail handles CSS.

[Via TUAW ]HTML, CSS, signatures, mail.app, apple mail, tips, rich text, howto

I’ve blogged before about how I use OS X’s Services to make life easier in Apple Mail, especially about Devon’s Word Services.

Textsoap takes text manipulation to an even higher level.

It provides a graphical interface (as well as Services) for over 70 different ways of treating text, whether in Mail.app, a word processor or a text editor.

It comes with plugins for TextWrangler and BBEdit, Eudora and MailSmith and works natively with Cocoa-based apps like Apple Mail and Pages.

With AppleScript you can extend its reach to cover Entourage, Word and AppleWorks.

“Scrub” is a pre-set series of text cleaning actions that removes forwarding characters, rewraps paragraphs and more at the press of a single button. You can customise it further with the “my scrub” feature.

But the interface also offers easy access to other functions, like setting the quote level of text quickly, adding initial capitals, changing between upper and lower case and much much more.

You can use it with the built-in editor or with its plug-ins and services inside any app you choose.

Recently the ability to clean Rich Text has been added to its plain text capabilities.

TextSoap costs money (Devon’s Word Services doesn’t), but USD 24.99 is not much to pay for the time it saves if you work with decent quantities of text. A 30 day demo is available from the developer’s web site.services, rich text, text formatting, cleaning