Road Mac OS X Leopard: Mail 3.0 - Page 2

At work, on a MS platform, this is how much of my official use of a computing platform gets used. That is via a mail application. Now this doesn't mean that a separate To-dos application isn't needed or welcomed just that tight integration with such is needed.

Configurability is always nice! The arrival of 10.5 will be very interesting indeed. I'm hoping it is innovative enough to reduce some of the shame that Apple has taken on with their handling of the iPhone updates.

Dave

I can't see how anything you just said has anything to do with the arrangement requested by the OP. He was talking about how folders are represented in the sidebar, not on disk! And in any event, there's nothing to prevent you from doing exactly what you have just described using Mail 2.0. Seriously, a script that runs every 45 days and purges a mail folder? Cron + osascript, what more do you need?

Email's been around since the '70s, dude

I've said this before and I'll say it again...I don't know why I do considering I understand everyone's got their own way of organizing things but...

...why is everyone fighting it? Why is everyone wasting precious time creating folders and scripts to filter/separate/delete specific mail? If you know what makes this category of mail so special, then it's probably entirely possible to create a Smart Mailbox or find the e-mail or the group of e-mail that you want through Spotlight.

I'm starting to see a lot of people pulling their hair out because they're living in a world that isn't as simple as it once was in the early 1980s and 1990s...a world where people regularly get dozens of e-mails a day, have hundreds to tens of thousands of photos and music files. Some people are still trying to sort and sift through all that manually. It's funny and sad at the same time.

Smart folders and filters+static_folders are pretty much the same thing in terms of knowledge and effort necessary to use them.

One of the reasons why smart folders aren't suitable for some users is that they have thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of email. Personally, I have over a decade of email in Mail.App. Smart folders simply aren't responsive enough for this type of use.

Oh come on. If you know that, say, half of those e-mails are irrelevant because they're more than 5 years old (this is just an example!), you can set a date range like "everything between 5 years ago and today."

The hundreds of thousands of e-mail could easily be cut in half right off the bat...that filter is done much more quickly...then the next filter will find what you want within the new pool of e-mails.

Also remember that Leopard's Spotlight is a lot faster than Tiger's Spotlight. If the Smart Mailboxes (which I'm pretty sure use Spotlight) do choke under Tiger's Mail even with a date range filter, then it's entirely possible that the performance issue could be gone under Leopard's Mail.

I'm not sure I agree that To Do and RSS should be separate apps. RSS has no place in Mail, to be sure, but why should it be its own application? Downloading and displaying markup from a webserver is the job of a web browser. To Do's have been an integral feature of the vCalendar/iCalendar format for some time, and are naturally and properly a service of iCal. The only one that really deserves a separate app is Notes. Keep the to-do integration for convenience' sake (no different than the existing iChat and Address Book integration, really), but leave Notes and RSS in the capable hands of Stickies and Safari.


Anything to make Leopard less drab and samey would be an improvement. "Unified UI" might be an obsessive-compulsive's prayer answered, but it's a nightmare from a usability perspective. Why they chose to use different buttons for Mail and Preview than the rest of Leopard is as mysterious as how they decided which apps would get the brushed metal and which would stay Aqua, but at least they've retained *some* visual cues for telling apps apart in Exposé.

Each user has their own preference. Apple has only introduced the To-Do functionality into Mail, I was initially using a 3rd-party software for my To-Do's (had a built-in alarm and reminder and everything) but I'm looking forward to this feature, which ties in Mail to iCal. Maybe in the future, Apple will consider making a seperate application for To-Do's. It's unfair to expect them to meet the demands of every kind of user, where some will appreciate the built-in functionality, while others will want it seperate. Give them some time and we might even get both.

Sensible observations

The article left out one mail program that Apple use to have which was an internal application which I never understood why it never made it into a commercial application.

It was called AppleLink, it was the mail and scheduling tool that every employee used at Apple from prior to 1988 to 1995. It was an enterprise wide application that allowed you to send email and file attachments mainly internally but with a little knowledge you could send to those few who actually had a Internet portal for email at the time.

You could easily schedule meeting and see if people were available. One of the best feature was the ability to see what people did with the email you sent, you could find out if they read it, and when, or if they just trashed it before reading it. This was not like getting a return receipt like mail applications today, you could click on each message and get info on it and it would give you a list of who it was sent to, even if it was forward and tell you what they did with the email even if the downloaded the attachments.

Anyway, this program worked really well and only today are applications able to do what this program did 20 yrs ago.

Every time a new version of Mail.app comes out, I take a deep breath and give it another try, and it always lets me down.

They keep puttering with pinstripes and templates and drawers but haven't focused on the core task: email.

I have about 100,000 messages in hundreds of folders. I travel often, and many times I have brief windows of opportunity to sync my mail up - 10 minutes of dialup in a hotel lobby in rural China, 15 minutes of wifi at an airport in Jordan.

Mail.app is totally useless under these conditions. It always insists on syncing every single IMAP folder, even though all I wanted was my Inbox. And even for that it takes an incredible amount of time. With Thunderbird it can be downloading mail within a few seconds even on a slow connection. With Mail.app there's often half an hour of spinning before it even starts.

It's a shame; I'd like to have the Address Book integration, and I think Mail does a better job of displaying messages - for example, I can listen to my voicemail directly in the Mail message preview pane, whereas with Thunderbird I have to download the .wav file and open it in Quicktime Player. But as long as it can't even get my mail in the first place, all those niceties are moot.

P.S. Suhail: I have messages in my inbox older than 1988. You may have been a nerd but you were out of the loop!

Yeah but in the meantime, your inbox continues to grow, and a lot of people would rather look at a clean inbox than create an "everything I can't categorize" smart folder. Also consider that some folks, particularly power users, may be accessing mail from various interfaces (Mail.app on the desktop, but also mobile phones, web interfaces, other clients at work in my case) where Apple Smart Folders just aren't available.

Personally, I use both because there are some tasks which are better suited to one and some to the other. Some mail I want to be marked as read immediately and never even see in my inbox or hear as an alert -- that's not the job of a smart folder. Sometimes I want to see all my new mail, but only as long as it's not from or to particular addresses -- that's not the job of a filter. See what I'm saying?

What I don't get is why anyone's making a fuss about it. Mail has supported both approaches simultaneously for two years now, and it works just fine.


That's nice, but most of us haven't had the opportunity to use Leopard's Spotlight yet. I don't know if it's because of Mail's sluggishness in grabbing new mail from a server, or the kludge that is Tiger Spotlight, but my Smart Folders seem to be particularly slow when they operate on inboxes. Maybe I need to do a little filtering...

In the 70's you couldn't even network an office computer. Was there email for the Apple II ?

Email doesn't require the Internet. The Internet is a network of networks. Local area networks (LAN) and wide area networks (WAN) were the way corporations linked email among their office branches before the Internet's arrival. The telcos provided the WAN link-ups between remote offices. A LAN could be set up in an office without the need of a telco (AppleTalk, Novell Netware, NT).

I'm sure then they were UNIX networks at Universities, mid to large corporations, and government agencies. All with dumb terminals until the early to mid 1980s where the PC replaced the dumb terminal.

Emails not displaying... or html not rendering.. or repeated downloads from the server of emails already viewed and deleted.

I'm all for the list of added items but email has got to be bomber... #1 on the list of features.

The visual cue thing could easily be solved if every window was badged with the application icon (in the bottom-right corner of the window, for example) and would be much needed now that the Finder looks like iTunes in Cover Flow view.

I'm not sure why Apple hasn't done this yet...does Apple hate the idea? I dunno. I've suggested it countless times and it's still not a new feature.

most if not all of my colleagues use their email prog as a sot of to do list - i use omnioutliner but i'll defo be checkin out the leopard to do list functionality. some of my colleagues remark mails as unread so they know its regarding a pending job

haven't figured out the point of rss feeds in mail but finally yay for the lists! i'd like better formatting tools too. I know html emails rnt the best but at times bold and colours come in handy to attract attention from the garbled up qoted messages i have to deal with

why not turn the formatting bar used in the new iwork into something system wide or improve those floating palettes already!

And I wonder if it will be any time soon. Qualcomm's giving up on Eudora but I guess there's some sort of open source offshoot of Eudora that's based through Mozilla or Thunderbird, or some such.

I agree. If you have lots of messages and need one message to be in one mailbox then filters are for you. But if you need one message to be in multiple mailboxes then a smart folder is the way to go.

Another way to look at is that smart filters shifts the pain of message 'placement' to when you view them, for filters it's when you download them.

On a side note, the placement of the menus for smart folder settings and filters settings appears to favor smart folders, they're easier to find and work with, as though Apple prefers users to use them. I might be way off base here but I remember when I switched I got this impression from mail.app and I still have it.

I guess I disagree with Macnoid and others.

Sure, the templates seem stupid for all except kids and grandparents. But this is probably a smart move by Apple.

For salty business guys like me, the other changes are welcome, and in some cases fall short.

The problem nowadays is the inbox. Mail piles up with action items, appointments, things to study later, etc. It has expanded beyond a simple communication tool.

I think this direction from Apple is stellar, and my only potential criticism--potenial because I have not used Leopard yet--is they didn't go far enough.

I am not saying they need to copy Outlook with its bloat, etc. But some grouping, etc., would be awesome.

For 10.6, I hope Apple takes a good look at the GTD tools, some stuff in gmail, and other time management tools, ALL of which over complicate everything, and put the Apple Magic Pixie Dust and make it simple and wonderful.

I wasn't too fired up about Leopard. I thought the secret features were anemic. (I guess I was hoping that my iPhone would be able to use my Mac as a "wireless headset," e.g. I could answer my phone, use the microphone and speakers on my Mac, and send SMS's all through my Mac. That was the killer features--one that would make the Windows people drool-that I was hoping for.)

Anyway, I am now looking forward to Leopard. Similar to each OS X upgrade, the advances don't look that impressive on paper, but once you use it for a week, you can't go back.

I suspect Leopard is going to rock. I just hope it comes without the low quality Apple has been known for of late.

Does anyone know if pgp/gpg mail functions I've added to Mail 2.0 will work w/o major changes w/ Mail 3.0?

http://www.sente.ch/software/GPGMail/

I didn't find any new info re: compatibility w/ Mail 3.0...



jwd

Smart folders aren't as smart as required, much of the time. There isn't enough AI to make them see what is needed.

I'd like to make a smart folder for all the e-mails that come to me that have anything to do with my daughter's school, in which I'm very active. But, so far, at least, I've not been able to figure out a way to configure one. Too many people send me mail, along with the various school personel. There is nothing in common with many of the e-mails for a smart folder to recognize.


I also buy much over the internet. I'd like to have a smart folder to grab all of the order confirmations, serial numbers, etc., that come in, but that seems to be too complex as well.


I've found this to be true for many needs.

The nice thing about the way they have implemented it is that it is exposed for programmers to access. So it is perfectly possible for someone to create a separate notes application and still tie into the notes/events database.

Are you kidding? Those things are the very reason I still don't switch from entourage. I like the integration of emails, to-dos, calendar events etc... In a normal day of work, I am constantly associating deadlines, meetings and such with emails.

Here's one very basic necessary feature I'd like to see in Mail someday if not sooner:

I'd like to be able to edit the subject line to my own liking. To not be able to do this is just bizarre. Forwarding is not the answer.

Also, I'd like to be able to move contacts into groups from the Address Panel instead of having to switch to Address Book itself. And how's about a BCC button in there as well?

When I add an attachment, I want it to ALWAYS show up as an icon, not the content of the file -- sometimes.

I don't understand why when I get an email with pictures in it, I also have to tell the program to save the pictures. Didn't it already download them anyway? Just go ahead and put them in the folder I've chosen for downloads.

I'd like to permanently set Mail as my default mail program instead of having Mail arbitrarily reset it to Eudora. I can't delete Eudora as I don't trust that everything got transferred to Mail.

I have already submitted all these feature requests to Apple.

People keep complaining about how Mail is getting bloated. It most certainly is NOT. There are 3 additions:

1) RSS - If you dont want to use it, it will be completely invisible to you. Personally, I think this is just an interim step towards a system wide RSS service like Vista's. But again, RSS does make sense in Mail, same as Newsgroups kind of make sense in thunderbird

2) ToDos - This is not an additional Mail feature, but rather a system wide service (correct me if i am wrong, but that is what I have read everywhere, and that is what this article seems to indicate). It makes complete sense to integrate this service with Mail, because a) it shows how other apps could use this service, and b) Mails are often a common way to create todos (such as events, etc).

3) By adding Notes to Mail (which really is not even a feature, but rather a second Draft mailbox, with different formatting and presentation) Apple has made Notes a roaming service, accessible from any internet connected terminal. So you take Notes in Mail when you want to transport those Notes with you. You can continue using whatever you currently use for Notes (I use stickies) but when you want it to be accessible from other computers/locations, you make a Note in Mail.

Incidentally, is anyone aware if the todos will also be contained on the IMAP account?

While I'm starting to agree for points 2 and 3 (it does make sense for Notes to be part of Mail but it's a hacky way of using e-mail as a medium to keep notes...I know people do it all the time but it doesn't mean it's right...like using Excel as a database), I absolutely disagree with point 1.

If anything, Usenet should be integrated to mail...not RSS. The only thing in common between emails and RSS is that they're both pushed information. It doesn't mean it should be part of Mail. RSS is already a system-wide service...it's already somewhat comforting to know that it's just tying into something that already exists.

The real reason I want Notes to be a stand-alone app that offers a system-wide service (sure, it can be integrated to Mail just like the To Do feature) is because taking notes is not an action that is restricted to e-mail. Why shouldn't I be able to take notes at any time? Why shouldn't I be able to select a paragraph on a webpage and make a note out of it (which could perhaps link back to that page)? Why can't I make a note out of something someone told me through iChat?

I know the main reason is because the amazing thing about Notes is that you send it to yourself through e-mail and that requires that an e-mail account be set up in Mail but there are certainly ways to have it a stand-alone app that acts as a local note-taking app that integrates INTO Mail so you can send these notes to yourself.

edit: on another note, the data detector feature should be system-wide too. Why it's restricted to Mail is again beyond my comprehension. Data detector in Safari and iChat would be much appreciated (it already is on the iPhone Safari)

Modify other people's subject line?

I like it. Can't wait to get an iPhone with all this new stuff in Mail.

Guess what? I actually LIKE Outlook. Well, actually, I hate Outlook. But I like the IDEA of it. The implementation of course is crap (crashes, hard to use, etc). I'm sure in a year Mail/iPhone will make it look like a joke. Outlook I must say is very useful at work, being a consultant, where I'm out and about frequently, with a busy calendar, and being frequently invited to meetings, and all this is coordinated through Outlook.

I like the idea of what Mail 3.0 is trying to do: "have a single point of attention to watch and organize yourself". I just disagree that the email program should be that single point.

When you receive a Fax it's saved to a folder, but to get your attention your Mac has to email it to you. If I want to write myself notes, you can things in Stickies but to be archived and put in with your other pieces of attention, you have to email it to yourself. If I want my Console app to bring the logs it makes to my attention, I need to email them. If I want iCal to remind me of something, I can have it display on-screen if I'm my Mac, but emailing a reminder is yet another option.

All of these things are competing for my attention and they want to use my inbox as a channel to communicate with me. But email is a time sink because of things that sound urgent when they aren't. I'll often shut down Mail during the day because I get too many "Urgent!" emails that really aren't. But having an app that shows my Email, iCal events, Stickies reminders, Incoming Faxes, Console log dumps, Growl notifications, RSS feeds, or whatever else I configure that's important to me.

Let's keep email for the humans trying to communicate with me and make Mail 4.0 the best email app out there. Put the functions for "focusing" into a different app, and make a plugin interface so that I can drop whatever apps I think are worthy of my attention.

Mail embodies two very good ideas. Be a great email client and be a focus point for getting things done. Hopefully this will become two separate apps in the future.

It's very, very handy, I do it with a script from the command line at the moment.

Imagine you have a message from two months ago with the subject "Re: Fw: Your mail" which is about some very crucial matter. Nice to be able to change it to "Brain transplant schedule for November" or whatever, so that you can quickly see it while scanning your "important" folder.

Hey, that's very soon, should we get a card and sign it?

Supposedly the feature was included, but I don't remember where I read it from. If not, hopefully Michael Rothwell's current IMAP-IDLE plug-in for Mail will continue to work .... but I would really prefer something proper from Apple

I don't know if I'd agree with overwriting the original subject - having that around would help quite a bit when you want to find related emails.

I do see that being able to tag an email with a subject line more appropriate to you, the recipient, could be handy, though. For the most part, this could be shown instead of the subject (i.e. in your mailbox lists and so on), and then in the message display area it could show your new subject and the the original subject afterwards. Using your example:

Subject: Brain Transplant schedule for November - Originally: Re: Fw: Your mail

The only downside I'd guess is that it would only show up with email clients that would be aware of the user subject override... which would probably be Mail.app, the iPhone and .Mac Webmail.

I can't take any to-do software seriously that doesn't have repeating to-do's (aka tasks). iCal does not have it and I'm extremely disappointed that the screen shot of mail 3's to-do dialog does not have a check-box or field for repeating the tasks.

I'm currently using iGTD for task management and it syncs fairly well with iCal. Through iGTD I'm able to better manage the tasks and repeating tasks sync to iCal with no headaches (unlike repeating tasks in Palm OS).

Apple should have a look at Gmail i/o Outlook.

Mail is about written communication: apple chat should therefore be included into mail, so one can have a look at the conversation afterwards. Conversations are treated very elegantly in Gmail (without the Re:s). Also, one can label different tags to your messages/threaded conversations without the need to copy your message to different folders.

As much as I like the new Stationiary idea, Apple has way to go to manage my daily mail.

Apple chat being the written chat thing (not the visual iChat).

"Todo" into mail could be a fun thing if you would be able to send these things to your team members

I could return your latter argument: Smart Folders require mails to be filtered to fall into special rules. Unfortunately, real life doesn't always follow rules. Imagine I've got two groups of friends who exchange lots of e-mails so I want one folder for one group and another for the second group so I can see discussions of either group all in one place without being disturbed by any other e-mail in between. Easy you say, just set the Smart Folder to filter with regard to sender/recipient? Unfortunately, some people belong to both groups, and not every time mails are being sent to the group but to one person only (in particular me, otherwise I wouldn't receive it obviously). I can't see any rule to cover that, but it's easy with 'hard' folders and simple filtering that covers 90% of all cases and me manually moving the remaining 10%.
I got lots of similar cases with my e-mail, so I can't imagine there wouldn't be a use for hard folders for other people.
Thing is, I can arbitrarily move any e-mails to any hard folder which I can't with Smart Folders. Life IS arbitrary oftentimes.

True true, but so far this poses no problem whatsoever. The one feature that needs most performance in Eudora, seaching through thousands of emails, is so blindingly fast anyways that I haven't missed the native Intel version so far. The only downside I can see so far is that it takes quite long to start up. Once it's running it beats any other email app hands down, speed wise. I just really, really hope Leopard doesn't break Eudora.