Archive for the 'Mail' Category

Mail 5.0: No longer deselects message after removing attachments

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011 • 6:30 pm

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 […]

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Mail 5.0: ‘Next Alternative’ shortcut with Canadian CSA keyboard

Monday, August 22nd, 2011 • 9:06 am

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 […]

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MsgFiler for Mac OS X: Successful transition to the Mac App Store

Thursday, April 14th, 2011 • 2:54 pm

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 […]

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MobileMe (IMAP) account: Don’t try to quit before Mail is done

Monday, April 4th, 2011 • 8:48 am

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 […]

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Mac OS X’s Mail: Replying to coloured messages

Friday, March 25th, 2011 • 10:03 am

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” […]

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Word 2011: Can’t render embedded pictures properly

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011 • 5:40 pm

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 […]

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Mac OS X’s Mail: Clicking on that ‘Send’ button

Friday, December 10th, 2010 • 12:17 pm

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 […]

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Mail 4.x: Contextual menu finally has a ‘New Mailbox…’ command

Sunday, September 19th, 2010 • 3:19 pm

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 […]

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Mac OS X’s Mail: More on message filing

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 • 12:52 pm

Following my recent posts about message filing issues in Mac OS X’s Mail and the feedback I have received by e-mail, I have a couple of additional comments to make. One is about the third-party MsgFiler plug-in for Mail. In my previous post on this topic, I wrote: Unlike LaunchBar, as far as I can […]

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Mac OS X’s Mail: MsgFiler for moving messages around

Friday, January 15th, 2010 • 4:19 pm

After reading my post on spring-loading and scrolling in Mail’s mailbox drawer, a couple of Betalogue readers wrote to suggest that I use a Mail plug-in called MsgFiler. Unlike AppleScript scripts or Mail-Act On rules, MsgFiler can be used to move messages to any mailbox in your mailbox drawer. The idea is that you define […]

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Mac OS X’s Mail: Spring-loading and scrolling in mailbox drawer

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 • 12:35 pm

There is something slightly annoying about the way the mailbox drawer in Mac OS X’s Mail responds to user actions when the user tries to drag a message or a selection of a messages to a specific mailbox folder nested somewhere within his mailbox folder hierarchy. Here’s the situation as I encounter it on a […]

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Mac OS X’s Mail: Time to end the password dialog madness

Monday, December 7th, 2009 • 6:16 pm

Today, I got an e-mail from my dad in France about Mac OS X’s Mail. While he was a math teacher by training, my dad was there at the beginning of the personal computing revolution in the late 70s and early 80s and ended up teaching various computer science courses at the community college level […]

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Mail 4.x: Even more frustrating behaviour when dealing with low-bandwidth situations

Monday, October 19th, 2009 • 9:40 am

It’s bad enough that, when checking mail in a low-bandwidth situation and getting a lack of response from a mail server, Mail typically reacts by throwing a modal dialog box asking the user to re-enter the account’s password, as if the password had changed and was now incorrect. This has been the situation for years […]

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Mail 4.x: ‘Copy Address’ behaviour is now ‘as intended,’ says Apple

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 • 2:26 pm

Three days ago, I wrote about a change in Snow Leopard that I considered a bug, which is that, when you right-click on the “From:” field of an e-mail message you have received and select the “Copy Address” command, Mail now copies the entire contents of the “From:” field and not just the e-mail address […]

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Mail 4.x: More on dragging in message list

Friday, September 25th, 2009 • 8:37 am

Yesterday, I wrote about what I believed was a new behaviour introduced in Snow Leopard’s Mail application when dragging items in the message list. As a reader pointed out to me, however, it appears that this behaviour already existed in versions of Mail prior to Snow Leopard. (I don’t know how far back it goes.) […]

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