Mail 3.0: ‘Remove Attachments’ command now selects… the next message in the list

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Mail
February 7th, 2008 • 10:42 am

Good grief. For years I have been using Mail’s “Remove Attachments” command to remove attachments from e-mail messages before filing them away, and for years Mail has been disrupting my workflow by causing the message to which I am applying the “Remove Attachments” command to become deselected.

This is highly disruptive as far as I am concerned, because typically I work like this:

  1. I select the message with attachments.
  2. I apply the “Remove Attachments” command to the message.
  3. I file the message away.

Mail forces me to reselect the message manually every time after step #2.

Have things improved in Mail 3.0? Not one bit. They have changed, but they have not improved.

Now, when I apply the “Remove Attachments” command to a message with attachments, Mail removes the attachments but, instead of simply deselecting the message, it selects… the next message in the list.

I can understand Mail automatically selecting the next message after deleting a message. After all, if you delete the selected message, the selection vanishes. Selecting the next message is better than not selecting anything at all, because then you would be forced to manually select something—and selecting the next message is the most reasonable thing to do because it is the thing that the user is most likely to do after deleting a message anyway.

But this is completely different. It seems to me that, if you go through the extra step of manually removing the attachments from a message, it is because you have something specific in mind, and that something specific is that you want to keep the message, and not the attachments. And if you want to keep it, again, it is quite likely that you are actually going to want to file it away in a mailbox.

This new behaviour in Mail 3.0, on the other hand, assumes that the thing that you are most likely to do after removing a message’s attachments is to leave it where it is and go to the next message in the list. I know that some people keep thousands of e-mail messages in their Inbox indefinitely, but are these really the people who tend to remove attachments from their messages in the first place? If they don’t care about how many thousands of messages they have in their Inbox, surely they don’t care all that much about how big these messages are either!

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that this change in behaviour is probably not intentional. Apple’s engineers did not actually make the deliberate choice of selecting the next message after removing attachments. They just changed something in the mechanism for deleting attachments (which was very faulty to begin with), and this change had the accidental side-effect of causing the next message in the list to become selected, instead of losing the focus altogether.

I suppose that some people would argue that selecting the next message is better than not selecting anything at all. After all, at least you can just go back one message up with the cursor key to rectify Mail’s misplaced selection and reselect the desired message.

But still, isn’t it pathetic that, after all these years, we still don’t have a “Remove Attachments” command that removes the selected message’s attachments and keeps the message selected?


2 Responses to “Mail 3.0: ‘Remove Attachments’ command now selects… the next message in the list”

  1. Paul Ingraham says:

    You crazy dreamer, you!

  2. Betalogue » Mail 5.0: No longer deselects message after removing attachments says:

    […] fixed. Instead of just deselecting the message after removing its attachments, Mail would… select the next message in the list (except when a whole thread was […]

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