AppleInsider on Mail 2.0

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
July 12th, 2004 • 11:11 pm

Mac rumour site AppleInsider has an article on Mail 2.0, the upcoming version of Mac OS X’s e-mail application that’s expected to be included in Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) next year.

Of course, Mail will include “smart mailboxes” whose behaviour will take advantage of Tiger’s advanced search functions. This, in itself, is rather promising, although it raises performance concerns (the current version of Mail is not exactly lightning-fast) that will only really be alleviated with the official release of the new system next year.

Until then, we are left to speculate and conjecture based on the rumours and leaks that will surface between now and then. Another interesting feature mentioned in the AppleInsider article is the addition of a “Mailbox Bar” similar to Safari’s Bookmarks Bar, where you can put your most commonly accessed mailboxes for quicker access.

I like the idea, but I am afraid that it only partially meets the organizational needs of people with a large number of mailboxes. What we need is not just a Mailbox Bar, but also a separate “Mailboxes” window in which mailboxes can be organized, removed, renamed, etc. without Mail automatically displaying their contents in the Mail Viewer window. For some reason, Apple seems reluctant to admit that users might want to access their mailboxes without opening them.

When I want to create a new mailbox inside my “Friends” mailbox, for example, I do not want to see what the “Friends” mailbox itself contains in terms of archived messages (if any). Yet right now, when I want to create a new mailbox inside my “Family” mailbox, I first have to click on the “Friends” mailbox itself in the mailbox drawer on the side, because this is the only (practical) way to indicate that you want to create a new mailbox inside an existing mailbox. And clicking on the “Friends” mailbox in the drawer causes Mail to automatically displays the contents of the “Friends” mailbox itself, regardless of whether it is an actual mailbox (blue folder icon) or just an empty mailbox folder container (white folder icon).

If it’s a white mailbox icon, it can’t even contain any messages! (Try dragging a message to it. Mail won’t let you drop it.) Yet Mail still insists on displaying its contents, i.e. an empty list with “0 messages” representing “0 bytes“. Ahem.

It may sound like a minor inconvenience, until the day you develop a friendship with someone with a weird Ukrainian last name whose spelling is impossible to memorize. You have messages from that new friend in your “In” box and you want to create a new mailbox inside your “Friends” mailbox folder with that person’s name. So you click on the “Friends” mailbox folder and… well, you can no longer see the person’s name in the “In” box because now Mail displays an empty list with “0 messages (0 bytes)” at the top!

There are, of course, work-arounds. You can open one of this person’s messages in a separate window and position the window so that you can still read the headers while creating the new mailbox inside the “Friends” mailbox folder.

Or, if your “Friends” mailbox folder also happens to be a mailbox itself (blue icon), you can drag the new friend’s messages to that “Friends” mailbox first, and then clicking on the “Friends” mailbox (to create a new mailbox inside it) will also, coincidentally, display the contents of that mailbox, including the new friend’s messages.

Or you can try to cut and paste that person’s name from one of his messages, but then if, like me, you tend to name mailboxes using the LAST NAME First Name convention, the name will probably not be formatted properly and you’ll have to type it out again just the same.

Still, the point is that organizing mailboxes shouldn’t be so inconvenient. And it’s inconvenient because we are limited to that mailbox drawer interface that serves a dual function (viewing mailbox contents and organizing mailboxes) that should be handled through two separate interfaces. (I am not advocating the removal of the organizational features from the mailbox drawer. I am just saying that, for power users with lots of mailboxes, there needs to be a more convenient way to organize things.)

The new Mailbox Bar with “mailbox bookmarks” to most commonly used mailboxes doesn’t really address this issue. I am assuming, of course, that the mailboxes in that Bar will actually be “aliases” to the mailboxes in the drawer (which will be different from the bookmarks in the Bookmarks Bar in Safari, which are stored separately). What Apple needs to do is provide a separate window for organizing mailboxes and extend the concept of mailbox aliases so that such aliases can be used anywhere (i.e. in the mailbox drawer as well).

The key thing to understand here is that the structure of mailboxes in the mailbox folder is Finder-like, and that users need access to more Finder-like features. A separate window for organizing mailboxes would be one such feature. (It would behave like a Finder window in List view mode.) Mailbox folder aliases would be another one.

Unfortunately, by the look of things, it will probably be several more years before we get to that point!


4 Responses to “AppleInsider on Mail 2.0”

  1. Pierre Igot says:

    Yes, I read his piece and it does sound promising. But these are still early stages… I am just concerned that, by the time Tiger comes out, it will be optimized for G5 machines and other Macs will be sort of left behind a bit…

  2. Will says:

    You said:

    “Of course, Mail will include “smart mailboxes” whose behaviour will take advantage of Tiger’s advanced search functions. This, in itself, is rather promising, although it raises performance concerns (the current version of Mail is not exactly lightning-fast) that will only really be alleviated with the official release of the new system next year.”

    If you read Daring Fireball’s latest piece, he talks about emails being stored in a one email per file hierarchy, and thus will be searchable with Spotlight.

    I guess the point is: they’re restructuring and improving the searching system (by using the system-wide file search), so speed will necessarily be one of the things that will increase.

    W

  3. glottalstop says:

    You wrote:
    “What Apple needs to do is provide a separate window for organizing mailboxes and extend the concept of mailbox aliases so that such aliases can be used anywhere (i.e. in the mailbox drawer as well).”

    I was using Claris Emailer (CE) via classic until Nov 2004 (reading the above in Feb 2005) which had exactly this function and it was most excellent. The separate window/drawer issue affects many apps and I wish they could be “undocked”. Of course, the downside of CE was that all mail was held in a single database file that was prone to corruption.

    I mainly held out with CE as I had around 14K unfiled e-mails (plus goodness knows how many in the 200 or so filing mailboxes I created. Try as I might, Mail just couldn’t cope with importing the sheer numbers of mail/boxes even after attempting exports via Eudora, Netscape mail and half a dozen others. I just had to draw a line under the software and jump without my archive.

    My point is that CE was an Apple product – can’t they learn from their own experiences?

    MAL

  4. Pierre Igot says:

    Eudora too lets you view your mailboxes in a separate window and makes changes, etc. It’s not just a matter of “undocking” the drawer. It’s a matter of providing alternate access to the mailbox hierarchy. What we need is a facility where selecting a mailbox does not automatically display its contents in the main area of the mail viewer.

    As for Apple learning from their own experiences, we wish :). Obviously, when they threw OS 9 away, they threw some of the baby along with the bath water. Since then, we’ve been struggling to get them to recover the lost bits — but after 5 years it’s still a struggle.

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