Road Mac OS X Leopard: Mail 3.0

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  • Reply 41 of 107
    brianusbrianus Posts: 160member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by wizard69 View Post


    I don't know about the posters original motivation for his request but there are good reasons to want this sort of arrangement. First; if we acknowledge that Apple storage of E-Mails as individual files is a good thing we then realize they are simple file system objects. This means that writing scripts to work against specific types of E-Mails is very easy.



    Lets say for Example that you can get Mail to sort out all E-Mails of advertisements from a specific vendor for you. If these end up in a specific directory you can then write simple scripts to purge these adds every 45 days for example. Other important E-Mails can be backed up to secondary storage automatically. The idea here is to populate your USB dongle with only the stuff from correspondents that you find important automatically.



    Things like searching for specific files with Finder would be easier too.



    In the end I would want what the original poster is looking for myself. The usability enhancements that Apple is making with OS/X have me looking seriously at it for use on a laptop. This from a Linux user. The thing is they need to move forward as far as removing artificial restrictions with respect to power users.



    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?
  • Reply 42 of 107
    brianusbrianus Posts: 160member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by suhail View Post


    NeXT had email back in 1988? How? There was no real internet in 1988! I was running an Amiga and a C128 back then and was considered a NERD, I do not remember email, I do remember local-networking chat-rooms using modems but not emails?



    Weird



    Email's been around since the '70s, dude
  • Reply 43 of 107
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by wizard69 View Post


    I don't know about the posters original motivation for his request but there are good reasons to want this sort of arrangement. First; if we acknowledge that Apple storage of E-Mails as individual files is a good thing we then realize they are simple file system objects. This means that writing scripts to work against specific types of E-Mails is very easy.



    Lets say for Example that you can get Mail to sort out all E-Mails of advertisements from a specific vendor for you. If these end up in a specific directory you can then write simple scripts to purge these adds every 45 days for example. Other important E-Mails can be backed up to secondary storage automatically. The idea here is to populate your USB dongle with only the stuff from correspondents that you find important automatically.



    Things like searching for specific files with Finder would be easier too.



    In the end I would want what the original poster is looking for myself. The usability enhancements that Apple is making with OS/X have me looking seriously at it for use on a laptop. This from a Linux user. The thing is they need to move forward as far as removing artificial restrictions with respect to power users.



    Dave



    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.
  • Reply 44 of 107
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    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.
  • Reply 45 of 107
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by dfiler View Post


    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.
  • Reply 46 of 107
    brianusbrianus Posts: 160member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by kim kap sol View Post


    Mail certainly is victim of feature-creep. I agree with Macnoid.



    I used to love Apple apps for their simplicity and focus. Mail used to be just that, a mail client. Safari used to be just a web browser. iTunes used to be just a music player.



    To Do, Notes and RSS do *not* belong in Mail. They belong as separate apps much like Address Book which provides a system-wide contact service used most prominently by Mail and iCal.



    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.



    Quote:

    There's also something wrong with the aesthetics of the app. They changed from normal toolbar icons to gel capsule-like buttons with a smaller icon inside in Tiger...ok. But Leopard is shedding away Aqua and moving to a platinum-look. The Finder, Safari, iCal, iChat, Address Book, Font Book, Dictionary, Calculator have all gone platinum with metal buttons with a black silhouette icon on them. Why hasn't Mail (or Preview for that matter)?



    None of Mail's toolbar buttons would be difficult to represent as a simple black silhouette except perhaps the Junk button. Check Mail is a simple envelop. Reply, Reply-All, Forward, Redirect and Bounce to Sender are just arrows. Delete is just a circle with a diagonal bar within it. Compose is a sheet of paper with a pencil...it's possible to do this as a silhouette and have it recognizable. Print and text sizes already exist in Safari 3.0's resources as black silhouettes.



    Some of the buttons would require more creativity...like the Color icon that pops the color palette up. And the Photo Browser and Show/Hide Stationery icon.



    Perhaps it would make Mail look too drab but it would actually fit in with the rest of Leopard.



    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.
  • Reply 47 of 107
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by kim kap sol View Post


    Mail certainly is victim of feature-creep. I agree with Macnoid.



    I used to love Apple apps for their simplicity and focus. Mail used to be just that, a mail client. Safari used to be just a web browser. iTunes used to be just a music player.



    To Do, Notes and RSS do *not* belong in Mail. They belong as separate apps much like Address Book which provides a system-wide contact service used most prominently by Mail and iCal.



    This new trend by Apple is disturbing. The line that separates what is and what isn't an acceptable feature to add to an existing app certainly isn't clear...but I could certainly have seen lightweight To Do, Notes and RSS Reader apps that could have tied into Safari and Mail if need be but would remain stand alone for people that simply need to add a note or add a To Do item without having iCal or Mail open.




    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.
  • Reply 48 of 107
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by brianus View Post


    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.



    Sensible observations
  • Reply 49 of 107
    maestro64maestro64 Posts: 5,043member
    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.
  • Reply 50 of 107
    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!
  • Reply 51 of 107
    brianusbrianus Posts: 160member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by kim kap sol View Post


    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."



    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.



    Quote:

    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.



    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...
  • Reply 52 of 107
    suhailsuhail Posts: 192member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by brianus View Post


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



    In the 70's you couldn't even network an office computer. Was there email for the Apple II ?
  • Reply 53 of 107
    mactelmactel Posts: 1,275member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by suhail View Post


    NeXT had email back in 1988? How? There was no real internet in 1988! I was running an Amiga and a C128 back then and was considered a NERD, I do not remember email, I do remember local-networking chat-rooms using modems but not emails?



    Weird



    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).
  • Reply 54 of 107
    mactelmactel Posts: 1,275member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by suhail View Post


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



    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.
  • Reply 55 of 107
    tinktink Posts: 395member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by rajulkabir View Post


    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!



    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.
  • Reply 56 of 107
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by brianus View Post


    ...but at least they've retained *some* visual cues for telling apps apart in Exposé.



    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.
  • Reply 57 of 107
    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!
  • Reply 58 of 107
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by zunx View Post


    Nothing like Eudora. The best ever e-mail application for Mac. A shame it is not yet native for Mactel.



    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.
  • Reply 59 of 107
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by dfiler View Post


    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.



    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.
  • Reply 60 of 107
    bwhalerbwhaler Posts: 260member
    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.
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