Betalogue

About a space between button icons and button text labels that is not part of the buttons.

Experimenting with Mail 2.0’s search feature causes a complete break-down.

More weirdness in Mac OS X’s Mail 2.0. Open an existing message in a separate window. Then compose a new message in another window. Don’t do anything after you’ve created the new message. Just leave it the way it is, with the cursor in the “To:” field by default. Now go to the other message […]

Try the following. Open an existing message in a new window, click on the body of the message and select some text there. Then without holding any modifier keys, move your mouse pointer to the header section and select some text there. Note that this does not deselect the text that’s currently selected in the […]

What is wrong with this picture? Quite simply, it’s the fact that my mouse pointer is over the corner of the window, which is a control that can be dragged to resize the window. Yet the mouse pointer is still an “I-beam” type of cursor, which absolutely no indication that this area of the window […]

This is yet another example of the lack of polish that still plagues Mac OS X’s Mail application. It affects people who, like me, use Mail without the message preview area in the bottom half of the main viewer window. When I want to read a message, I select it in my Inbox and then […]

A few weeks ago, I noted a problem with the visual interface in Tiger’s Mail, where the vertical scroll bar in the main viewer window would be active with a blue scroller indicating the presence of stuff below the visible area, even though there was nothing beyond the visible area, with the message list stopping […]

I am a long-time Mail user but, ever since I switched to it from Eudora back in 2002, I have maintained the habit of using it without the message preview pane. In other words, my main viewer window in Mail has the list of mailboxes on the left-hand side and then the message list area, […]

I’ve just discovered a terrific enhancement for Mac OS X’s Mail. It’s called Mail Act-On. It’s open source software. And it works extremely well. It takes advantage of the fact that, when you are not composing a new e-mail message or a reply, typing letters doesn’t do anything in Mail. For example, you still cannot […]

What is wrong with the picture below? Well, you cannot exactly tell because I didn’t want to make the screen shot too big for practical reasons — but the fact is that this is the bottom-right corner of the main Mail Viewer window in Mail 2.0 (with the message area collapsed), and that this mail […]

Well, it’s taken a loooong time, but finally somebody at Apple has done something about it. It used to be that, on a Canadian CSA keyboard such as mine, the keyboard shortcut for making text bigger didn’t work consistently across all Mac OS X applications. Since the “+” key is actually shift-= on my keyboard, […]

I have a sequence of actions in Mail 2.0 that can pretty reliably make messages disappear for good. It doesn’t move them to the Trash. It makes them disappear completely. This is bad. Try the following… Make sure you have a mailbox called “XXXX” (whatever) in your list of mailboxes. Then send yourself a message […]

In Mail, view the contents of mailbox A (by selecting it in the list of mailboxes). Select a message in mailbox A and move it to mailbox B. Now view the contents of mailbox B (by selecting it in the list of mailboxes). Then view the contents of mailbox A again. Press command-Z to undo […]

Select a message marked as unread in your Inbox and drag it to another mailbox. Hit command-Z to undo the move. The message comes back to the Inbox, but is now marked as read — even though the message was not read at any point! (I am not using the “message area” at the bottom […]

Let’s say you have an archive of old Eudora e-mail in a folder with the following file/folder structure: Eudora Folder/Mail/Macintosh/Apple/ and the “Apple” folder contains several mailboxes you want to import. That’s all you want to import: not all the mailboxes contained inside “Mail“, but only the ones inside the “Apple” subfolder. In Mail you […]