Mail annoyances

grant barrett - breaking lines the way Mail does is done for readability. Mail clients that can understand format=flowed will reformat them into an unbroken paragraph, and others just see the short lines. If people you send to are getting broken lines, it's because their software is still living in the 90's and hasn't figured out format=flowed yet.

If you don't see why this is the right approach, you must not remember all the years when people complained about mail with lines that were too long.

jason mark -

I've never had trouble sending attachments to Windows users, top, bottom or middle of the message. I send stuff to my mom and co-workers all the time, no issues.

One tab from subject to body... Only way I can figure you get up to four tabs is if you have accessibility options set to have tab move to pulldown lists (that would add the account and signature pulldowns) and have the Bcc field turned on. Of course, none of those are the default setting.

Lastly, while I know of no way to do bulleted lists, indenting in the body is easy: hit the tab key.

Jonathan Neil - I'm not sure what mouse you're using, but scroll wheel works just fine here. It scrolls whatever the mouse pointer is hovering over (message text, message list, mailbox list...)

Seems like I'm the only one here that's pretty happy about Mail.

Two things:
- DON'T compare Mail to any other app. You should look at it as an alternative.
- I'm only a little bit disappointed that I have to bring up the Activity window now and then (instead of how it was in pre-Tiger Mac OS'es - just in a small bar on top).

An ugly long-standing bug: send an attachment to a Windows user when using Rich Text format and the recipient gets random QUESTION MARKS all over the message. Only happens with Rich Text. I know, Plain Text is more secure, but a bug is a bug!

I use Thunderbird 1.5 instead of Mail...no more annoyances.

Using the space bar may work with the Preview pane visible, but it doesn't work correctly. If I have my mail sorted with the most recent message at top, then hitting the space bar assumes I am moving up the mail folder instead of down it. I read my mail last in, first out.

This is, of course, on top of Apple stupidly assuming that people read their mail with new messages at the bottom (which is how new mailboxes are set to sort.) I don't and never have, since my way is the way I've been doing it since 1992.

My number one peeve, however, is the one that many people have: the absolutely retarded line breaks in outgoing plain text messages. Get rid of that stupid space! Don't force line breaks! Text messages should NOT HAVE LINE BREAKS INSERTED. Don't care about no RFCs or standards.

My number two peeve is that when I choose a sig file and then make edits to it in a message, if I choose a different "from" address, it completely deletes that changed sig file. That is very much counter to expectations.

Slow attachment downloading is the most annoying feature of Mail for me.
It may only be a 2 meg attachment. Sometimes, it can take 10 minutes to download! All of this at cable modem speeds! Still 10 minutes.

Yuck!

it bugs me that the scroll wheel on my mouse is locked to the message window. even if i click in the message list, the scroll wheel still scrolls the message, not the list.

Every few years I try mail, and it's just not up to speed with Entourage.

The problem with Entourage is that it stores all it's data in one database, which makes nightly backups of an office full of Macs expensive as people's mail folders get over a few gigs, but other than that it's a great, powerful, email application for people who are on all email all the time. Mail just isn't there (for me) yet. Biggest gripes are:
* autofill of names is SLOW compared to Entourage, so as I switched from Entourage to Mail I find I have to constantly go back and pause to have it auto-fill a name for me (1.67ghz powerbook).
* Received attachments (pdfs, etc.) showing up inline make it very hard to use
* Sending attachments aren't always visible to Windows users unless they're at the very end of message, which is embarrassing (oh you're sending from a Mac, no wonder it doesn't work... why don't you get a real computer).
* it takes 4 tabs to get from subject to body.
* no easy way to make bulleted and/or numbered lists, or indent.
* Apples spellchecker is slow. I find when jotting off short messages it flags known words as unknown, and I have to wait a little while for it to catch up.