Filed under: Bad Apple
Apple still doesn't really get email
Fix one problem, and another comes up. Everyone was a big fan of how Apple's .Mac webmail used to sometimes attach a text document when you simply replied to someone. I mean, I know I was utterly overjoyed to go back, copy and paste, remove the attachment, and reply. Wow, that was really easy, wasn't it? Yeah. Well now Apple has fixed that with their shiny new "Web 2.0"-ish email. Unfortunately, there's a new problem. When I reply to certain emails (usually Reply All in a list), the address is often filled out with the person's name, followed by their email address. This makes sense, as pretty much every email system in the world does this. But Apple, ever the innovator, has made this "break" your email. Trying to send will result in an error, claiming quoted contents aren't valid email addresses. Golly Apple, thanks for saving me from my own stupidity! Now I get to manually edit the addresses just to make sure they are correct. Another time waster. Don't get me started on how it's taken our favorite fruit half a decade just to build an almost-usable email client application (certainly won't be business-class anytime this decade). I mean, waiting until 2007 just to have a proper email client? Super. Anyone else not really digging Apple's lame attempts to manage email?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
InSaNeBoY said 1:13PM on 11-13-2006
No complaints here. I think mail and .mac mail work just fine, I have yet to have an issue with either.
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SubGenius said 1:14PM on 11-13-2006
Speak for yourself!
I'm much happier with Mail than Lotus Notes.
Every app has it's own quirks.
The Easter Bunny, Santa Clause, unicorns & perfect email clients...all imaginary.
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Marco F. said 1:17PM on 11-13-2006
No problem here, also with quoted names followed by .
I think there's something wrong in the "From:/Reply-To" field of one of your contacts, and not with .macmail
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Scott F said 1:21PM on 11-13-2006
#2:
I'd be much happier with a twice-daily kick in the nuts than Lotus Notes. It's just about the most awfull program ever made for Windows (including Windows).
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Thirstigard P. Snippity said 1:27PM on 11-13-2006
" Everyone was a big fan of how Apple's .Mac webmail used to sometimes attach a text document when you simply replied to someone. "
My copy of Elements of Style just exploded.
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Daniel D said 2:55PM on 11-13-2006
People seem to complain about mail but I think its perfect....
It sends, it receives it saves drafts...smart boxes...I love it it does what i want and it does it great. IMO
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Egdio said 1:29PM on 11-13-2006
I gave up on Mail this summer. More and more Mail was becoming "cutesy." When I saw what's coming up when Leopard is here, I decided it was time to move on to another program.
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Ian Charles said 1:44PM on 11-13-2006
Hey look more bitching by the bitchiest Apple weblog on the net.
What a surprise, not.
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jason said 1:44PM on 11-13-2006
Our programmers have no problems with mail, but any of our power users (over 100 emails per day) have moved to Entourage. So many little things just "don't work™". Examples include:
* Very slow IMAP performance with large mailboxes (machine hangs for minutes at a time).
* Auto-complete too slow, and requiring power typers to slow down or back up and fix errors
* No way to add, or veiw, attachments other than inline. This is esp. time consuming (minute lags) when using large PDFs.
* Strange characters when putting attachments inline if sending mail to a Windows user.
* Search is too "smart" to actually use (although I haven't tried the latest version, so maybe you can now say "find emails from last week from Rob with attachments", but you couldn't before.
Such a bummer,
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Jeremey Barrett said 1:44PM on 11-13-2006
I've used alot of mail apps, and Mail is the best of the bunch for what I need, which is email. People complain about it, but have you seen the competition? Thunderbird is arguably the best competitor but its UI is atrocious by Apple standards and it's noticeably slower. It goes downhill from there.
Some people value a huge feature list and lots of "function" over form, but if it doesn't "just work" I don't want it, anymore. Mail is the most clutter-free email app I've used.
Mail is also the only client I'm aware of which has a *force* plain text viewing option (even if it is undocumented). I hate HTML mail, and Mail allows you to turn off HTML mail entirely for any mail which has any kind of plain text alternative.
It also consistently renders in monospaced font in that mode, which no other client does correctly (Thunderbird's font rendering is laughable).
.Mac webmail has always been very usable for times when I don't have Mail available, it's clean and doesn't fill the screen with useless cruft. But I don't expect a desktop mail client from it, I expect webmail.
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Dorian said 1:51PM on 11-13-2006
I use gmail. Why bother with a local email app, and concerns about storage space, backing up and remote access?
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Sherman Homan said 2:11PM on 11-13-2006
Uh oh, I like Mail.
Its junk mail filter is excellent. I have five accounts imap and pop and it syncs with my laptop. I was disappointed with the web interface because their is no functional junk filter, the very thing I like the most about the application!
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V. Mardian said 2:14PM on 11-13-2006
Gmail's threading behaviour is far superior. I just wish I could synchorize my gmail contact list with my Address Book without having to import/export each time I make a change to one of them.
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naquah said 2:02PM on 11-13-2006
Though Mail and the webmail equivalent are far from perfect, this post is extremely exaggerated. Bugs happen.
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captainjaroslav said 2:14PM on 11-13-2006
Thirstigard P. Snippity - Hilarious!
On topic, I also have had no real problems with Mail.app. I wish I could understand what the complaints are because it seems like a really nice application to me. I certainly like it a lot better than Outlook, which I use at work, blech!
I don't use .Mac, so I can't comment on that. It has never seemed worth the price to me since everything it gives you is generally available either for free or as part of services most of us already pay for. (Well, except for the syncing, and it steams me that Apple wants you to buy .Mac even to sync computers on a local network, that's just annoying!)
Dorian, I think Web mail might be just great for people who are never disconnected from the Web, but many of us like to work offline sometimes and Web mail doesn't cut it then. Also, simple actions frequently require the entire page to refresh when using Web mail, which can be really annoying if you don't have a speedy connection. Oh yeah, and Web mail's inherently uglier, too.
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William Jackson said 2:27PM on 11-13-2006
I can't copy and paste a url from one tab into the webmail when using Firefox 2 on a PC (at work). IE6 works. Anybody else had that problem?
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Kacy said 2:32PM on 11-13-2006
I've never had a problem with webmail or Mail.app either. People complain about .Mac. Spread out over the year, I believe .Mac comes out to something like $0.27 per day which I'm happy to pay since it goes back into the company and supports R&D.
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Rick said 2:33PM on 11-13-2006
Even with it's flaws It's still much better than MS Entourage, which I use at work. Apple at least realizes that simpler is sometimes better and in this case I agree.
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icerabbit said 2:47PM on 11-13-2006
I have several small complaints about Mail and one major one: since 2.1 it crashes about once a day on average. Whenever Mail receives a SPAM message in the background, I switch to Mail and when it previews the message => crash.
The biggest disappointment really is the lack of an update / bug fix after countless bug reports.
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michel said 7:27PM on 11-13-2006
I use Mail.app in my work (network administrator of windows/linux/mac in a university) for Years, so I go thousands of email (to keep traces of intervention and demands) , Ten thousands of spam (to feed your spamassassin servers and others tests)
and I use it with Imap with 1gB of quota (cyrus mail server on linux system)
no slowness.
could be better ? yes. is thunderbird better ? sometimes yes, sometimes no
is outlook better ? not entirely, impossible to use it on mac of course
Eutourage ? has not all features I want. and so on.
>>8. Our programmers have no problems with mail, but any of our power >users (over 100 emails per day) have moved to Entourage. So many little >things just "don't work™". Examples include:
typical. Users have many differents needs.
>* Very slow IMAP performance with large mailboxes (machine hangs for minutes at a time).
yes, mail is not the fastest imap client. (in fact, many mails software are slow with imap). but to hang a machine ? I use and old powermac G5 with 512 of memory. no "hangs" of the machine. even if I use Office (excel), omniweb, Pages and others unix stuff.
>* Auto-complete too slow, and requiring power typers to slow down or back >up and fix errors
hu ?
>* No way to add, or veiw, attachments other than inline. This is esp. time >consuming (minute lags) when using large PDFs.
it always shows them inline, but the pdf are just tiny icons. it's not "displayed".
>* Strange characters when putting attachments inline if sending mail to a
>Windows user.
you can ask Mail to stop to sending RTF mail
if your enterprises use Exchange servers, you can change some settings in Exchange to stop use specific microsoft formats. (it bothers also Evolution, Thunderbird and others standards mailers)
>* Search is too "smart" to actually use (although I haven't tried the latest >version, so maybe you can now say "find emails from last week from Rob with >attachments", but you couldn't before.
you can, smart folders
maybe you can now resize windows in Microsoft Windows but you couldn't before (true)
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so ? yeah, software has quirks. but maybe I'm just crazy seeing pink cows and my boss is crazy to pay me. Some people are loving Thunderbird. me ? no. others are crazy about Evolution, others it's Outlook XP..
good for them. if your network use standard technologies, all should work fine.
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