Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Internet Tools
Mac Whine: Mail.app's wandering columns
As long as I can remember - at least since Mac OS X 10.4 and possibly even 10.3 - Mail.app hasn't been able to maintain column widths to save its life. It doesn't matter if I never touch the window width, or if I manually set each column exactly where I want it, or even if I ask nicely - Mail.app almost seems to enjoy playing an obnoxious game of 'what me worry?' with my column widths, tossing them to the digital wind at every opportunity. Run a search? Hello suddenly-double-sized-Attachment-column. Put on a pot of coffee in between TUAW posts? Better make extra room for the Date Received column, cuz there's no telling how much space it's going to gobble up behind my back.
Ok fine, for the record: I don't actually believe Mail.app can tell when I'm making coffee. Still, the point stands: Mail.app needs to brush up on the 'How to be a Good Lil App' rules and learn how to keep everything in its place.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Aron Trimble said 5:23PM on 4-18-2007
wow... I just laughed aloud and the person sitting next to me thinks I'm weird... THANKS
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imnotjesus said 5:29PM on 4-18-2007
yeah, i feel the same way. it's almost annoying enough to switch clients. almost.
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Yigal Arens said 5:30PM on 4-18-2007
I *hate* this about Mail! It drives me nuts!
I've noticed 2 things that cause problems: searching, and switching between mailboxes that do and don't have message threading turned on. The two may be related, since search result windows don't support threads.
My second Mail peeve: After all these years, it still hasn't realized that seaching in the "From" field of a regular mailbox is related to searching in the "To" field of the Sent messages mailbox. You always have to click on a different search field...
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shaun said 5:37PM on 4-18-2007
Yes, I loathe and despise this behavior.
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Snaggy said 5:47PM on 4-18-2007
Me too! lol, great post.
Man, I hope Leopard deals with Mail's quirkyness, and doesn't just stuff it up with greeting cards and the like.
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Jon said 5:50PM on 4-18-2007
I hope this is fixed in Leopard. AppleInsider had some screenshots of Tiger vs Leopard apps a few weeks back and the latest build had made the interface more unified (no more brushed metal - yay!)
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hessi said 5:52PM on 4-18-2007
oh yes - and it isn't able to keep track of the columns I'd like to have displayed in different folders.
Well, I guess I should be happy that someone at Apple thought about displaying To: instead of From: in the Sent Messages folders, but what about my smart folders? I have smart folders that search in sent messages, too, and I'd like to display the To: column as well, but without seeing this column in _all_ my folders.
Instead, they add HTML and stationary... are they kidding?!?
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Michael La Framboise said 5:52PM on 4-18-2007
Well... yeah... sometimes it messes the columns up a tad.. but hell; at least it can resize them by itself, unlike every other damn app... I mean here I can make the size of the window larger or smaller and it just changes the sizes of the columns to fit what I need... but then you take like iTunes for instance and you change the window size and you end up w/ either a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom or a bunch of wasted space... so I'd rather have an app that messes up once a month then an app which creates inconvenience every day :/
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Aaron Harnly said 6:16PM on 4-18-2007
The column-widths thing is people's #1 complaint about my Letterbox widescreen plugin for Mail.app, and I always feel like protesting -- hey, I know it sucks, but it's not my fault! Really!
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Playstation 3 said 6:33PM on 4-18-2007
Aye - I have the same problem. And I had the same problem before I started using Aaron's excellent plug-in. Thanks Aaron! I now view my mail in widescreen bliss.
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G said 7:30PM on 4-18-2007
iTunes 7.x does this with Store search results as well. Previous versions didn't have this problem. I hope Apple doesn't think this is a new and better way to do things. It is not.
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Bear said 7:38PM on 4-18-2007
ive never had this problem before with mail.app... everything has ALWAYS stayed put, even running a spotlight search..
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Alexis said 7:38PM on 4-18-2007
This only happens to me when I search for something in Mail. I do the search, select an email, click the x in the search bar to end the search, and the attachment column is about 4x its original size (I have it set to the minimum where you can only see the paper clip). Oddly enough, I wasn't able to reproduce this on the 2 PPC machines I tested it on, but was able to reproduce it every single time on the Intel machines I have access to.
Has anyone reported this bug yet? I was planning on doing it through Apple's bug reporter, but I got lazy and totally put it off.
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Stuart said 7:40PM on 4-18-2007
Relax, have a cup of tea.
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mayo said 7:47PM on 4-18-2007
I second "Bear" (#12). Never happened to me, and I got heavily customized columns and widths. Maybe it's some sort of plugin people are using that causes this? (The only plugin I have is GPGMail)
Might be worth trying trashing the preferences and see if it keeps happening, but I've never seen or had this issue before.
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Alexis said 7:58PM on 4-18-2007
@mayo:
I have no Mail plugins installed and this happens to me every time I search. What kind of machine are you running, PPC or Intel?
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Ben Hoskings said 8:27PM on 4-18-2007
Strange, I've never had this problem with Mail.app. I run with the Letterbox plugin that puts the panes in columns instead of rows, which may well affect it.
http://harnly.net/software/letterbox/
As an aside, if you have a widescreen display like most new Macs, it makes far better use of the space. Highly recommended.
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Staggie said 8:29PM on 4-18-2007
I've never had this problem. Of course, I fully expect that I will discover it after reading this article, and it will now drive me crazy. But until now I had never noticed a problem.
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Chris said 8:47PM on 4-18-2007
I'm amazed a the lack of credible mail clients on the Mac. I stuck with Mail.app for ages simply due to lack of choice, until finally moving to gmail. The crashes and unpredictable behaviour finally took their toll.
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Mr Bob Dobolina said 8:55PM on 4-18-2007
I use letter box too, and I do have this problem.
It drives me nuts, because when I do a search, the date column completely disapears out of the section and it takes me the better part of 3 minutes to get everything lined back up again.
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