Panther’s Mail: disappointing

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
November 4th, 2003 • 12:22 pm

Mail is of course one of the applications that I use most often, so I will tend to focus on it first. Performance is greatly improved in the new version (1.3).

There are several well-documented improvements. But, as Marc’s article mentions, there are still things that have not been added/restored. I am disappointed, for example, to see that the Signatures feature hasn’t improved one bit. You cannot assign a specific signature to a specific email account, which is really disappointing. I’ve become used to selecting my signature of choice manually every time before sending a message out — but I’d still like the option to automate this to a certain degree (with filters as well, as can be done in Eudora).

There’s also still no option to check for new email at a different time interval for each email account.

On the other hand, the silly “Open as new message” command in the “File” menu has finally been renamed “Send again” and moved to the “Message” menu, where it belongs. It still only works only for one message at a time, however, so if you have several messages that you want to resend, you have to select them one by one and apply the command to each. Annoying.

It’s still impossible to select a mailbox folder in the Mailboxes drawer in order to edit its name without having Mail show its contents in the main window area. Why Apple can’t see that there is a need to edit/reorganize mailboxes independently from the need to view their contents is beyond me.

The improved interface for handling mail attachments is welcome — but Mail is still missing the most important feature as far as I am concerned, i.e. the ability to delete an attachment without deleting the corresponding message that contains it. Darn.

I suppose these are all changes that will have to wait until version 2.0 comes out. But there is absolutely no indication that Apple is even working on a version 2.0 of the Mail application.

There is always the competition, of course, but things are not exactly rosy on that side either.


4 Responses to “Panther’s Mail: disappointing”

  1. brian w says:

    I believe MailEnhancer will help with your issue with signature handling.

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    René: I’ve tried this feature, but it doesn’t seem to be working… When I select a message and choose “Remove Attachments”, the message itself disappears from my list for a second, and then reappears, still with its attachments intact.

    Brian: Thanks for the link. Will give it a try. It’s not a perfect solution, and it’s third-party, but it’s better than nothing.

  3. René Puls says:

    While there is no way to keep attachments separate from the actual messages, there *is* a way to delete all attachments from an e-mail:

    Message -> Remove Attachments

  4. Pierre Igot says:

    René: Correction — the feature does appear to work in most cases. It just seems that the first message I tried it with didn’t work, for some reason.

    Cool!

Leave a Reply

Comments are closed.