Panther’s Mail: Unexpectedly closing message windows

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
January 20th, 2004 • 4:23 am

Sometimes you are in the process of reading an email message in its own window in Mail. You see a sentence or a paragraph that you’d like to forward to a friend. So you select the relevant portion of the text in the message and click on the “Forward” button.

Mail correctly creates a new message with the selected portion of text included as quoted text in the body of the message. You then just need to add the recipient in the “To:” field and click on “Send” and away it goes. And the window of the forwarded message closes.

Then you want to finish reading the original email message… The trouble is that its window is no longer open. You have to find it again in the main mail viewer window, and double-click on it (or press Return) again, and then scroll down again to the location where you stopped reading.

Why did the message window disappear? Because Mail assumes that, when you decide to forward a message (or part of a message) to someone, you don’t want to do anything else with the message. In other words, it decides for you that you should always do things in Mail in the following order:

  1. Double-click on a message to open it.
  2. Read it in its entirety, by scrolling down if the body extends beyond the visible area.
  3. Once you’ve done reading it, go back up and select the portion of the body that you want to forward to somebody else.
  4. Click on “Forward” and send the forwarded message.
  5. Select another message or switch to another application.

If you want to do things in the following order:

  1. Double-click on a message to open it.
  2. Start reading.
  3. When you see an portion of text that might be of interest to a friend, select that text.
  4. Click on “Forward” and send the forwarded message.
  5. Finish reading the message.
  6. Close the message window and select another message or switch to another application.

then you are out of luck, because that’s not the way Apple wants you to do things.

It’s nice when a piece of software anticipates your needs and does things for you automatically that you’d otherwise have to do manually. But it’s not as nice when it ends up doing things automatically when you don’t want it to do them. It’s a balancing act, of course, but that’s what user interface developers are paid for.


One Response to “Panther’s Mail: Unexpectedly closing message windows”

  1. vaag says:

    A workaround is using the services menu to send a selection.

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