Ronald, a Hawk Wings reader, sent me some screenshots of the message threading in Thunderbird and Mail.app.

I knew that both email clients can thread messages, but I had never twigged how much more elegantly it is done in Thunderbird.

As you can see from the following images, Thunderbird is able to nest replies within replies, something that Mail is not able to do:

Ronald was hoping that I knew of a plugin for Mark.app which would emulate the smarter threading. I don’t know of one and I expect that developing one would be a lot of work.

Nonetheless, I am posting these shots partly for their own value (why isn’t Mail better at this?) and partly on the off-chance that someone knows of a plugin or tweak that I don’t know about.

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Adam Rice has written a fine piece on the current shortcomings of Mail and how it could be made better.

It is more considered than the responses to TUAW’s “How Mail sucks” campaign and more comprehensive than the Talking Mail.app series, in which celebrities and developers were only allowed to nominate the one thing they disliked the most.

He divides his suggestions into two groups: one for things that are simply “broken” and need to be fixed, and another for areas in which a better Mail.app could be truly innovative.

Posts like this deserve to be read.

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It is impossible to go away from a post by Pierre Igot at Betalogue without learning something new. Two recent post are no exception.

He details several shortcomings in the way that Mail presents the user interface for threaded messages and in the method it uses to auto-select a first message to display when any given thread is expanded.

A second post expands on the problems , especially how keyboard shortcuts operate in normal and threaded views.

Several of the issues arise because of the way in which Pierre likes to use Mail:

I use Mail with the so-called “message area” pane closed. In other words, my main mail viewer window in Mail consists of the mailbox list on the left-hand side and the message list on the right-hand side. I don’t have a third pane at the bottom displaying the contents of the currently selected message. I don’t like that, because when that “message area” pane is visible, any message in the message list becomes marked as read as soon as you select it, whether you actually want to read it or not.

People who use Mail in the same way will find the second post especially interesting.

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Pierre Igot at Betalogue is frustrated by the not-very-smart algorithm that controls the way Mail threads messages. It doesn’t have to be as dumb as it is, he reckons:

As far as I know, Mail also uses unique e-mail message identifiers in the message headers to follow threads even when subject lines are changed. So it obviously can be smart in some cases. Why does it have to be so dumb in other cases?

He wishes that Mail had some kind of manual command to separate emails that Mail has mistakenly dumped together.

Kevin Bjorke, a Shading Engineer at NVIDIA, wonders why Mail.app won’t tell him what messages have been moved by its rules as Eudora does. “The program hides information from me and puts the burden of organization onto me to keep in my head — the opposite of what “productivity software” is supposed to do,” he says.

Rob Hyndman has just switched to Macs, buying a shiny new MacBook Pro. He is liking the whole experience , especially using Apple Mail:

Apple Mail is a joy to use on this box. Very simple, elegant, clean. I’m forgetting Outlook already :). But I do need to figure out proper archiving of emails. I have 5 years worth +, to about 5 gigs of email that I need to have handy and searchable.

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A German blogger wrote a post that deserves a wider hearing, if only because its passion is so heart-felt:

You email maniacs out there, let me tell you something — Never trust your emails to Apple Mail.

Really. I have not come across such an awful piece of email software for a long time. And I test all sorts of pre-Alpha releases.

But Apple Mail? With IMAP? Forget it! Gruesome.

I need pretty well four tries before an email is really properly marked as read.

Threading by name is not available. Who hit upon the silly idea of implementing threading by subject only? Why do you think the mail server puts equally clear message IDs in the headers?

Spam? It remains a puzzle to me how exactly Apple Mail learns if an email is spam or not.

But after marking the twentieth incorrectly-identified email from Deutsche Welle as ‘Not Spam’, even this wretched piece of software ought to recognise that I want to read them.

Sometimes I think that I would use my time more productively if I were to throw myself into RoundCube’s code and fix bugs or try my hand at producing some extensions (PGP-plugin, spam filter, threading). Then at least I would know who to blame if something goes wrong.

To the people at Apple who I have to thank for the opportunity of searching through my backups for two weeks of emails: May your hard disk disintegrate into its constituent parts and your backups get eaten by a dog!

This is a quick and dirty, unpolished translation. But as you can see from BabelFish’s effort after the jump, humans do not need to fear that computers will corner the translation market anytime soon.

(more…)

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Jason Clarke takes exception to an often-repeated productivity tip (e.g. on Lifehacker ) that subject lines should be edited to reflect the content of the message.

He points out that this will bust the threading on Gmail and other email clients (like Mail.app - as Greg rightly points out in the comments, Mail.app is not fooled by edited subject lines, but lists all the messages in the same thread.)

So the short term gain of added communication has to be balanced against the longer term loss of archive and search functionality.

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