Betalogue

From time to time, I have no choice but to use Mail’s lousy Search feature to try and locate an email message somewhere inside my 5-levels-deep archive of several thousand emails.

For some reason, whenever you try to find something using Mail’s Search function, Mail automatically starts updating the color of all the messages in all the mailboxes that are being searched. If, like me, you have to do a search “in all mailboxes” and you have hundreds of mailboxes with thousands of messages in them, this process of updating the color of all messages based on one’s rules as defined in Mail’s Preferences dialog box can take a significant amount of time, even on a very fast machine. And during that time, Mail becomes utterly unresponsive — again, even on a very fast machine.

As if this weren’t bad enough, Mail also decides, in a seemingly random fashion, to change the “Read” status of certain archived messages. Typically, after doing a search that involves my entire archive of mailboxes, I have about half a dozen mailboxes that suddenly contain one or several messages that are flagged as “Unread” — even though they were received, read, and archived a long time ago (sometimes several years ago!).

I can see that because, when a mailbox contains any messages flagged as unread, that mailbox and all its parent mailbox folders are displayed in bold face in Mail’s mailbox drawer, along with the number of unread messages involved.

So I have entire archives of old mail that suddenly, after I’ve used the Search function in Mail, appear to contain unread messages — when it is so obviously untrue.

Mail’s Search function really needs a major revamp, not only in its interface, but also in the way it works and the obviously buggy behaviors it causes.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, May 5th, 2003 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.