It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder, “What were they thinking?” Since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I have noticed, on more than one occasion, that when I attempted to drag a selected message in Mail’s message list in order to file it in a specific mailbox, instead of responding to my mouse […]
Last week, I wrote about the changes made by Apple to the feature that enables you to copy a file name in “Save As…” dialog boxes by option-clicking on it in the file list below the file name field. It turns out that, somewhat inevitably, the changes have introduced new problems. Take for example what […]
Apparently, a bit of work has been going on under the hood at Apple’s Mail application department, especially when it comes to editing plain text messages. (Mail uses rich text, i.e. HTML, by default, but I still prefer plain text for most e-mail messages, and a lot of other e-mail users agree with me that […]
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote two blog posts about performance problems I was having with my Mail application in Mac OS X 10.5 and my large archive of over 100,000 messages. At the time, I reported that I was unable to complete one of the main troubleshooting steps involved in trying to eliminate […]
This is a follow-up to my post earlier this morning about the problems I had this morning with trying to rebuild my “Envelope Index” file for Mail. I have managed to solve the problem, with some prodding from a kind reader. I carefully monitored the reimporting process (i.e. rebuilding of the “Envelope Index” file) and […]
When I wrote about the new problems I was experiencing with Mac OS X’s Mail a few days ago, several readers chimed in to suggest that I try trashing the “Envelope Index” file in the “Mail” folder and force Mail to rebuild it. Long-time readers of this blog might remember that I am in fact […]
This one is a bit of a mystery to me. I have been using Mac OS X’s Mail as my e-mail client for many years now, and have slowly but steadily been accumulating an archive of thousands and thousands of e-mail messages in various mailboxes. I am always careful to remove attachments before filing messages […]
The beauty about the Quick Look feature introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is that it feels so natural that you get the impression that it has always been there. Once you start using the Space bar to preview files in the Finder, it is quite easy to get into the habit of wanting […]
It’s sad but true. Ever since Apple switched us from the classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, the list view mode in the Finder has been treated as a second-class citizen. It has been buggy, neglected, abused, and more. Unfortunately, nearly ten years later, there are still daily reminders of this class struggle in […]
I am afraid I am being forced to curtail my on-line activities somewhat. Since Monday, February 2, my pseudo-high speed Internet hook-up via satellite has been on the fritz. It might not have been a coincidence that, on that day, after several weeks of very cold weather, we had milder temperatures, which caused all kinds […]
There’s one small thing about the real world out there that Apple’s software designers seem to have a hard time understanding: sometimes servers fail. They become temporarily inaccessible. A racoon eats through an optic fibre cable. Lightning strikes. In other words, shit happens. Unfortunately, this means that, when shit does happen, Apple’s software offers, well, […]
I have already had several opportunities to discuss the frustrating lack of polish of Mac OS X’s Mail application. One area in particular that has been really frustrating since Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) came out a couple of years ago is the text engine used by Mail for composing e-mail messages. Sadly, for the […]
I don’t know what Apple’s engineers did to the progress bars in Mac OS X 10.5’s applications, but they sure are much less useful than they used to be. A progress bar is, as the name implies, a way to indicate the progress of an action that takes a long time, so that the user […]
A bug in Leopard’s Mail that should be fixed pronto—along with many others.
A more comprehensive explanation of the probable cause and solution for this problem.