So in the name of good ol' fashioned coffee talk, I'm bringing the question to you: let's say you're in charge of Apple Mail's development. What would you change, fix or enhance? Is there a bug in need of squashing, or does a plugin need assimilating? Perhaps there's a missing feature you dream of at night? Feel free to share. You never know, someone more important than even TUAW might be listening. I ran a piece like this over on The Unofficial Photoshop Weblog back in September and Adobe's Product Manger of Photoshop stopped by to respond to readers' comments. That was awesome, but I'm not making any guarantees. Just grab a good cup of coffee and let's hear it.
You're in Charge: What would you change about Apple Mail?
So in the name of good ol' fashioned coffee talk, I'm bringing the question to you: let's say you're in charge of Apple Mail's development. What would you change, fix or enhance? Is there a bug in need of squashing, or does a plugin need assimilating? Perhaps there's a missing feature you dream of at night? Feel free to share. You never know, someone more important than even TUAW might be listening. I ran a piece like this over on The Unofficial Photoshop Weblog back in September and Adobe's Product Manger of Photoshop stopped by to respond to readers' comments. That was awesome, but I'm not making any guarantees. Just grab a good cup of coffee and let's hear it.











Reader Comments (Page 1 of 7)
10-25-2005 @ 12:37PM
Thorn said...
I request a fix.
In Mail, I have my Inbox + folders sorted by date so that the *newest* emails are on top. Unconventional, I know, but ...
My gripe is that when I delete an email, Mail moves UP (instead of down) to select the next email. This is unlike any other mail program I've used, and even after a few months of using it, I still accidently end up having to rescue emails from the trash can becuase when I press DELETE 3x, I expect the email I've currently highlighted, plus the two BELOW it, to get deleted -- not the two ABOVE it.
Le Sigh
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10-25-2005 @ 12:39PM
mediaburn said...
I want to see it ported to the pc. Outlook sucks :-)
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10-25-2005 @ 12:44PM
Philipp said...
It would be great to have full control over html/plain-text formatting and displaying of emails.
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10-25-2005 @ 12:44PM
systemsboy said...
My major beef with Mail in Tiger is that inserting tabs into a message doesn't work properly. After entering a tab, it becomes a series of spaces. Try it: open a new message, type test, hit tab, type test again. Now arrow back through the characters. Instead of jumping back the full tab length when you reach the spot where you typed the tab, it goes back one space at a time. Tabs are used for making evenly spaced tables, which I do all the time, but it's broken in Tiger's Mail. It worked in Panther, and I want it fixed.
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10-25-2005 @ 12:47PM
burton hollifield said...
I would make it deal better with systems with bulletin boards. We use 'cyrus' where I work. I cannot use mail at work; I have to use Thunderbird, because mail seems to want to subscribe to every possible board on our system. Fix that, Apple.
Nothing worse that starting up mail (so I can use spotlight to search emails) and then waiting 1/2 hour for it to refresh to all the thousands of boards on our system.
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10-25-2005 @ 12:47PM
Philipp said...
And, what I forgot, is what happens to me every time I try to empty my trash: Mail only deletes emails I deleted locally but none of them I deleted in my IMAP-mailbox, i.e. I have to use "apple + a & backspace" two times. It's nothing serious but should be concerned as a bug. :-)
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10-25-2005 @ 12:50PM
AK said...
Support for Mail.app in an office environment is needed to even think about using Mac's for business.
Specifically, native support for MS Exchange is needed - for both Mail and iCal is badly needed. Snerdware's Groupcal (http://www.snerdware.com/) does not yet work with Tiger.
Ximian and the Ximian Connector are now open source, but only run using Fink - but most users won't bother with that (plus the current version is unstable).
See more on my related /. thread here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=156738&cid=13139017
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10-25-2005 @ 12:56PM
Scott said...
Anyone else have this problem?
If I am reading a mail, say a long one like from the cocoa development mailing list, and I scroll to the bottom of that e-mail, clicking to the next e-mail in the sequence will put my cursor at the bottom of that e-mail too rather than putting it at the beginning of the message.
Drives me nuts.
I filed a bug report way back when but we'll see if it ever gets any attention.
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10-25-2005 @ 12:56PM
Kim Brockie said...
Well here is defentily 2 BIG features that should have added
having a iCal window directly in mail, and that you could set your mail and calender up with a exchange server.
a function to Disable attachment preview :|
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10-25-2005 @ 12:57PM
Rob Nolen said...
I love keyboard shortcuts. What genius decided to make the Send Message shortcut Shift-Open Apple-D, instead of Open Apple-S? Outlook is Alt-S. And the first comment is dead on, that is really annoying as well. Also, why don't the Home and End keys go to the beginning and end of the line like they are supposed to when editing a message? That bugs the crap out of me.
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10-25-2005 @ 12:58PM
chase said...
The ability to manage reciept behaviors would be great...
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10-25-2005 @ 1:03PM
Ian G. Canino said...
How about better integration with iCal? Link mail messages to events and being able to set up appointments from within mail?
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10-25-2005 @ 1:04PM
Sven said...
Using Mail daily, and occasionally ical. Would like to use ical more though. Tried Entourage for a while. Integration is top. Please integrate ical and Mail. Makes more sense than have to get out of one program and into another just to look at the schedule, when making a mail about an appointment.
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10-25-2005 @ 1:04PM
Simon said...
I'd love to be able to flag a message to remind me to deal with it later. I often want to deal with a mail later in the day, but after a few hours, it's buried and easily forgotten. I know there are Applescripts that do similar things and integrate with iCal, but that kind of integration isn't really necessary all the time. I just want it to nag me.
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10-25-2005 @ 1:05PM
Will Clark said...
I would love to see some more formatting capabilities when drafiting an email such as bullet lists or ordered lists.
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10-25-2005 @ 1:08PM
Peter Garner said...
Fix the bug whereby if you have Mail.app as a login item and set to hide, it doesn't hide.
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10-25-2005 @ 1:08PM
gillsans said...
Amen on Exchange server support, especially with iCal. But only because I don't recieve meeting invitations from Outlook and I refuse to use Entourage. Luckily Entourage isn't much better with Exchange support so I can justify it ;)
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10-25-2005 @ 1:09PM
The Plaid Cow said...
* Good AppleScript support.
* Ability to turn off the bar that show a reply and just have the > characters.
* Email aliases which are not in Address Book (like for mailing lists)
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10-25-2005 @ 1:11PM
Geir-Tore Lindsve said...
What I really would like to see fixed is the place where the cursor are set when I want to reply to a mail. I hate top-posting, so I would like to have the cursor initially set below the quoted text (like I can set the signature to be under the quoted text).
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10-25-2005 @ 1:13PM
Shua said...
When using SpamAssassan you have a spam folder that spam gets moved to - since this folder is within your Inbox (using IMAP) the New Mail count includes all the spam that you have received - this is handled differently in Panther, etc. I would like to only see the new mail that is in the Inbox, NOT including what is in the spam folder.
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