Betalogue

Macworld has a new column by Dan Moren and Lex Friedman about Apple’s use of “silent email filtering” for iCloud accounts. As John Siracusa notes, this is nothing new. Apple’s silent mail filtering “has been going on since the .Mac days”. But I suppose people need to be reminded from time to time. As a [...]

In Lion (OS X 10.7) and Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8), Mail has a bug that, for certain types of e-mail accounts at least, causes the application to fail to identify sent messages containing attachments as such. The paperclip icon never appears in the message list, and the “Remove Attachments” command is greyed out, even [...]

Sometimes the sheer stupidity of how Mail handles (or rather cannot handle) network failures just boggles my mind. A couple of days ago I heard that people using one particular ISP in our area (the cable company Eastlink) were experiencing a general system failure and did not have any Internet access for several hours. Then [...]

I am not sure why, but I am going through a phase where any encounter with a software bug on my computer leaves me with a feeling of intense frustration. I just cannot believe that I have to live with so many bugs that affect my work on a daily basis in my computing life, [...]

What is it exactly that Apple’s engineers have against people wanting to remove attachments from their e-mails? Ever since Apple added the “Remove Attachments” command to Mail’s interface, back in 2003, it has been plagued with problems. It has always been, and still is, impossible to undo the command. Given that it is quite a [...]

Sometimes, as a Mac user, I can be my own worst enemy. As reported earlier, I installed Lion on my main machine last month, and since then I have of course encountered a number of bugs that I have been reporting to Apple through the appropriate channels. But any major system upgrade can also cause [...]

As Matt Gemmell notes, in Lion the Mail application now has a “Favorites” bar at the top, underneath the toolbar. This bar can be customized like the one in Safari, except that you can only add single mailboxes as buttons, so you are limited by the space available. One of the side benefits of this [...]

In Lion, Apple has finally fixed a long-standing problem with message selection in Mail. The specific symptom was that, when you selected a message containing an attachment and then chose the “Remove Attachments” command in the “Message” menu, Mail would indeed remove the attachment from the selected message, but then it would also deselect the [...]

It’s happened again… There is a long history of Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts failing to work properly for users of non-U.S. keyboard layouts because the keys involved in the shortcuts are located in a different place on their keyboards. There was a problem with the shortcut for the “Cycle Through Windows” command in Snow [...]

A while back, I wrote about message filing in Mac OS X’s Mail and, in particular, I mentioned the third-party tool MsgFiler and its apparent pros and cons. In spite of my initial reluctance (due in part that I had already shelled out some cash for Mail Act-On and didn’t want to add too much [...]

For the past year or so, I’ve been able to use our new local wireless service to connect to the Internet, with average throughput ranging from 1.5 to 3 mbps. It’s not great by any standards, but it’s far better than what use to be the only alternative, i.e. a satellite-based service with major latency [...]

The other day, I finally got tired of having to deal on a daily basis with a bug that I reported to Apple back in… 2004 (!) and is still not fixed in the latest version of Mac OS X’s Mail available, i.e. version 4.5. In its “Preferences” dialog, Mail has a feature called “Rules” [...]

If I had to provide a very visual illustration of the quality of Microsoft Word for Mac OS X, this would be a good example. I am working on a Word document authored by someone else. (I have no idea what version of Word they used. It’s apparently too much to ask that Word include that information [...]

Am I really the only one who’s regularly affected/annoyed by this? When I compose a message in Mac OS X’s Mail and then go to the toolbar to click on the “Send” button to send it, I regularly manage to hit a “dead” spot when clicking does nothing, even though my mouse is clearly—as far [...]

As regular Betalogue readers know, I have been a member of the AppleSeed program for several years now. This means that I get to test early builds of new versions of Mac OS X (and occasionally other Apple applications), including incremental software updates that consist primarily of bug fixes, but also major system revisions. (I [...]