Betalogue

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 […]

Brent Simmons (developer of NetNewsWire) has a problem with the click-through behaviour of the toolbar buttons in Mail 2.0. I am not sure what his problem is. Either an application supports click-through — i.e. the ability to click on a toolbar button directly from another application — or it doesn’t. NetNewsWire doesn’t. Mail does. Given […]

Configure Mail so that it automatically adds one of your signatures when you create a reply to a message, and also so that it quotes the entire message in the body of the reply. Now select a plain-text message (I haven’t tested this with HTML e-mail) in your Inbox and hit “Reply” to compose such […]

Mail 2.0 is better than Mail 1.x in that it is finally possible to bring the UI focus onto the mailbox drawer itself (or whatever it’s called now) using the Tab key, and then use certain keys on the keyboard to do certain things — like going up and down the list of mailboxes with […]

There’s little that’s more annoying than an application that lets you undo certain commands but not others. Unfortunately, Mail has always suffered from this problem, and still does in Tiger. More specifically, while you can undo the deletion of a message or the action of moving it to a different folder, you cannot undo the […]

I think I’ve finally understood the reasoning behind Apple’s decision to make Mail’s sound effects play through the sound output device selected for system alert sounds in the first tab in the “Sound” preference pane in System Preferences. A year ago, I complained about the fact that Mail 1.3 had introduced a change that made […]

In previous versions of Mail, there was an on-going problem with message text colouring. I have a number of Mail rules that colour my messages using a number of different colours depending on which Address Book group the sender is part of, etc. This would work fine, except that, as soon as I selected a […]

Mac OS X 10.4’s version of Mail introduces a major architectural change when it comes to the way e-mail messages are stored on your hard drive. In Mail 1.x, e-mail messages are not stored as individual files, but as part of the mailbox that they are stored in. The mailbox itself is stored as a […]

The other day I noted a problem occurring in Mail 2.0 when using Spell Catcher X. Thanks to terrific investigative work by Evan Gross, the developer of Spell Catcher X, we now have a clearer idea of what’s going on… The bottom-line is that the text engine used by Mail 2.0 when composing e-mail messages […]