Earlier today, I posted about the ability to find previously deleted emails using the Spotlight search on the iPhone, adding to the already intense swarm of news surrounding this issue. My findings were that, by ensuring your trash folder was emptied and refreshed, the problem appeared to be solved.

However, many of you responded indicating that this did not work for you, and that you were still seeing cached messages. Then Cult of Mac posted an update to their original piece, suggesting that the problem was more specific to POP accounts. Although I had tested both POP and IMAP accounts with similar results, I decided to investigate further.

First, to clarify: The problem here is *not* with Spotlight caching the contents of your email, as many have suggested. Spotlight simply indexes the available content on your phone, and logs a pointer to it. When you tap a search result, it opens the associated application and tells that app to view the content. In this case, it sees an email message and asks Mail.app to open it, which it does, because Mail.app still has the message content stored locally. Secondly, this appears to be specific to POP accounts. On IMAP or Exchange accounts, deleted email messages do appear in Spotlight results until the trash folder is emptied, as described in my earlier post.

I created a fresh account and configured it for POP access, then downloaded the mail. Searching spotlight, I could see the message I was looking for. I then went back to the message and deleted it, and that's where the fun starts. I conducted this same test multiple times, and found that sometimes, the message would now show up in Spotlight twice, one result opened the message, intact, with the Inbox listed as the folder to return to; the other displaying a message in the trash folder, but with an error displaying the body of the message. Other times, I would only see one result, pointed directly to the trash.

Note: The problem discussed below behaves differently depending on the type of email account being used. Users of POP mail accounts are indeed noticing a problem with deleted email messages appearing in Spotlight search results. Please see this post for updated information.

Our friends over at Engadget have highlighted a Cult of Mac post that, at first glance, appears to have found a bug in Spotlight's caching of email search results on the iPhone. The idea is that after you delete an email from your inbox in the iPhone's Mail.app client, you can still locate and open the e-mail using Spotlight search, if you know the subject of the message.

What's really happening, though, is what Apple might otherwise call "user confusion." When you delete an e-mail message in most mail clients, the message isn't magically deleted, but instead moved to a "trash" or "deleted messages" folder. Being a folder, it is indexed by Mail to provide an unread count, as well as by Spotlight so that you can easily find messages in the folder. When you search for the email, it shows up in Spotlight and opens in Mail because the message still exists in your trash folder.

All right, so what can you do to avoid this? Well, you need to empty the trash folder from your email. With many providers, you can just go to the trash folder, and delete the message from there to permanently remove it. The problem there is that, if you use a service like Gmail, the message doesn't really get deleted when you do this because of the way Gmail translates its labels into folders. Gmail's Trash folder is also set to purge itself after 30 days by default.

Your options? You either have to use the Gmail web interface in Safari, or if you don't mind tweaking your Gmail settings, you can enable the Advanced IMAP Controls Lab and then change your Gmail settings to immediately delete messages instead of using the trash folder. (Note that if you have your "All Mail" label configured to show up in IMAP, you will need to either disable it, or delete the message from that folder on the iPhone as well. See this thread for more information.) Once you've deleted the message, go in to the Trash folder and hit the refresh button to ensure that the message is no longer listed, which will remove it from the local mail cache. This should also clear up Spotlight's index so that the message no longer appears.

By now, you're probably wondering if this is really something to worry about. In my opinion, it really depends on how you manage your email. If you rarely delete messages, or you just delete things that are not of interest to you, they will most likely disappear from your trash folder after a specified time period that is set by your email provider (usually somewhere between 7 and 30 days.) However, if you intentionally delete messages with the idea that the message is unretreivable, then you should probably consider testing this out for yourself to see if it affects you. Again, with many providers, just periodically deleting the contents of the trash folder will do the trick. If you use Gmail, or your company's email services are hosted by Google, then you may need to log in to the web interface periodically to empty the trash, or you can look into the available configuration options, if you feel comfortable doing so.

So in reality, this isn't really a bug as much as it is what I would call "intended, but unexpected behavior." Many people simply forget that the trash folder exists, particularly on the iPhone where you don't always see it sitting off to the left hand side of your inbox. Checking your trash folder for any unintentionally deleted items, and cleaning out the old messages periodically, isn't really a bad habit to get into. With that said, however, I do think that Apple could improve this behavior by implementing some simple changes like adding an "Empty Trash" button to the trash folder, showing the count of all messages in the trash instead of just unread messages (so that it's easier to notice there are messages in there), and having Spotlight either ignore deleted messages like Leopard's Spotlight does, or at least indicate that they were found in the trash.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you consider this to be a bug, or do you think it's just a place that Apple could improve the experience on? Let us know in the comments!

Update: Leander Kahney has posted an update to the original Cult of Mac post that clarifies this issue a bit more. It seems that accounts using POP are configured by default to remove messages after one day or one week, thus causing them to continue to appear in Spotlight search results. Unfortunately, there isn't an option to remove them immediately, however, only after a day, one week, one month, or never. Because of this, Spotlight still sees them in the index, and Mail still contains a cached copy of the message until the time limit configured in the settings is reached.

If you'd like to check out this setting for yourself, go to the Settings app, tap on Mail, Contacts & Calendars, and choose the POP mail account you want to modify. Scroll down and choose Advanced, and the retention settings will be at the top of that page under Deleted Messages. It appears the default for a new account is to retain messages up to one week. So this is still the OS doing what it's configured to do, but there really should be an option to remove messages immediately here. If Apple were to add an option there, and/or remove Spotlight's ability to index deleted messages, the problem would be solved.

Update 2: After further investigation, it appears that some messages deleted on POP accounts do disappear from Spotlight, while others show up long after the message is deleted. I have conducted several tests on this situation, including on different versions of the iPhone OS, and have posted an update with details.

Once again, it's time for another edition of Ask TUAW: the place where we try to answer all of your Mac and Apple-related questions. This week we're taking questions about bypassing the Apple registration screen, installing Leopard Server on the latest Mac Mini, AppleCare for iPhone version 1.0 and more.

As always, we welcome your suggestions for this week and questions for next time. Please leave your contributions in the comments for this post. When asking questions, please include which Mac and which version of OS X you're running. If you don't specify, we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac.

Tom asks:

When I do an install of OSX or after bringing home a new Mac I get to a screen that asks me to register. If I don't want to fill out that information in is there any way to bypass it?

Sure. Once you get to the registration screen simply press the Command and Q keys and you will see a new dialog box come up. On it, one of your choices will be to "Skip" the registration process. Simply click it and you'll move on to the next screen to create your user account and finish the setup of OSX.

John asks:

I have a Leopard Server installer DVD from last year and I'm having trouble installing the software on one of the new Mac Minis. It won't even boot the Mini nor will it work when I try upgrading OSX client to server. Once it installs I get endless restarts, etc. What's the best way to accomplish this?

If you were one of the many users who upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5.6 soon after it came out, then you might have experienced some major problems on your Mac. Fortunately, Apple has admitted there were issues with the update. Now there are more updates to fix the problems.

Last night, Apple released a Mail update for users experiencing problems with Mail unexpectedly quitting. "This can be caused by using a copy of Mail that wasn't updated properly (you may need to install the Mail Update)," the update page states.

If you have been experiencing problems with Mail.app post-10.5.6, then you can install the update by visiting the Support Downloads website and download the installer package.


Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

I find the Mail.app plugin Widemail extremely useful. At my day job I use Outlook and the widescreen view is very efficient for space management. Prior to upgrading to Leopard, I used the application Letterbox written about here; however in my recent search for a Mail-enhancing plugin I wanted something a little more robust. Enter Widemail. It not only provides the awesome widescreen view from Letterbox, but it provides a means for creating a two-line message row similar to that found in Outlook for Windows and Entourage on the Mac.

Since we last wrote about Widemail the developer has added a preference pane within Mail.app making it easier to tweak settings. Additionally, the Widemail custom column can now have items that are left-aligned and right-aligned within the same row. Everyone's favorite automatic self-update framework, Sparkle, has been added as well.

Widemail makes Mail.app exceptionally more functional for my day-to-day use and is a free download (as in, feel free to make a donation).

[via Lifehacker]

Have you ever been reading an email in Leopard's Mail.app and thought, "Oh, I need to remember that"? If you can right click, then you can remember anything, quickly and easily, using Todos. When you come across something in an email you want to remember, first highlight the text.

Next, right-click on it and select "New Todo." The current message window will then show a notepad-style view of the selected text. From there, you can change the due date and priority. Finally, assign that todo to the iCal calendar of your choice by clicking the orange arrow/circle beside the item.

Mail displays Todos in the sidebar. To see your tasks in iCal, select "Show To Do List" from the "View" menu.

Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section.

While most people are probably satisfied to send their photos from iPhoto through their Gmail accounts using Mail, some people would rather have a more direct option. For example, sending large files through Mail seems to be no problem for me, yet from the same network with exactly the same settings, my wife's Mail chokes and spits and frequently fails when she tries to send a bunch (or even a few) pictures from iPhoto.

Tired of playing with her SMTP settings and getting everything working for one message, just to have it fail on the next one, I finally went in search of a more direct approach. My wife and I are both "switchers," and back in Windows we were used to Picasa, which has the ability to send photos via a Gmail account built-in. Makes sense, since Google owns Picasa, but that's exactly what I was looking hoping to get iPhoto to do.

In my searches I came across an iPhoto plugin called iPhoto2Gmail. When I tried it last week, it hung my iPhoto instance every time I tried it and I had to force quit iPhoto. I gave up on iPhoto2Gmail, but couldn't find anything else. In desperation, I went back to have another look at iPhoto2Gmail and discovered that it had been updated to version 1.0. Crossing my fingers, I gave it a try, and... it works great!

Though I don't need it on my machine, I really like the direct simplicity of sending my photos from right inside iPhoto, and I think I'll continue to use iPhoto2Gmail. If you've been struggling with sending photos through a Gmail account, this might be a useful option for you.

Have you used Mail's stationery and thought that it was too limiting or did not appeal to your tastes? With a simple save button, you can create your own stationery to be exactly the way you want it. Just create a new Mail message, filling in the body as you see fit -- use special formatting, colors, even filler text.

When you have completed your stationery template, click File > Save As Stationery. A dialog box will prompt you to name your new creation. Enter a descriptive title and click "Save." Your new stationery will appear under "Custom" whenever you click the "Show Stationery" button in a new mail message. Clicking your template name will automatically recreate your template in the body of the new message.

This is handy for businesses or individuals who need to have custom formatted emails, and need them to be uniform each time they send them.


Like this tip? Want more? Just visit TUAW's Mac 101 section.

There are some people that like the sleekness of HTML email, then there are those that appreciate the simplicity of plain text email (no images or styled text, thanks very much). If you use Mail.app and want it to force all incoming email to display as plain text, then open Terminal (Applications > Utilities) and type in the following command:

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

Now when you receive an email, Mail.app will only show you the plain text of the message. To reverse this command, just replace "TRUE" with "FALSE."

Like this tip? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 and Terminal Tips sections for more.

A loyal reader recently sent in a tip asking us had we seen a dialog in Mail.app. The dialog in question is produced when creating a new note and pressing command + b. You would expect it to be a shortcut for bold, but no ... it brings up the above dialog.

The dialog specifies that by converting the note to Rich Text, devices such as the iPhone will not be able to edit it. Could this be a sign that notes syncing between iPhone and Mail.app could be coming in the not so distant future? We can only hope so.

Thanks for the tip, Shayan!

Update: As some have mentioned in the comments, iPhone notes syncing was an expected, but not released feature of iPhone 2.0.

Recently, a friend asked me to create an AppleScript that would allow him to automate To-Dos with a Mail.app mail rule. I immediately rose to the occasion because this was a cool idea: Mail.app could run the script when you get an ebill, for instance, for your car payment. The script would then create an iCal To-Do for "Pay your car payment, now!"

The script
set theSumm to "Pay My Bill Soon!"
set dueDate to (current date) + 10 * days
set theUrl to "http://www.paymybillexample.com"
set thepriority to 1

tell application "iCal"
make todo at end of events of (item 1 of every calendar) with properties {summary:theSumm, due date:dueDate, url:theUrl, priority:thepriority}
end tell

Customizing the script
To customize the To-Do's title, fill in the text you want, within the parenthesis on line 1. To Change the due date, change the "10" in line 2 to the number of days until it is due. If you want to change to weeks or months, use the appropriate wordage instead of "days" at the end of line 2. To change the URL, paste a URL in the parenthesis on line 3.

By default, the script will set the newly created To-Do to have a priority of 1, however, you can change this to your priority preference.

Continue reading to learn how to integrate the To-Dos with a Mail.app mail rule.

Adam Tow's MsgFiler plug-in for Mail.app has been a favorite of many Mac users since it was first released in 2006. In the succinct words of Mr. Tow:

"MsgFiler is a plug-in for Apple Mail which quickly files emails into existing mailbox folders. MsgFiler's fast searching means you just have to type a few characters to find the right mailbox. Move selected messages with a click or open a mailbox without having to navigate the mailbox folder pane. MsgFiler is optimized for keyboard-only usage, perfect for Apple Mail power users."

Version 2.0.3 has just arrived on the scene, with a new installer app and refinement of the interface being the two big changes. MsgFiler now works properly on HFS+ Case-Sensitve partitions and ignores mailbox directories, and Adam has added a new "Hide mailboxes from inactive and offline accounts" feature for the proverbial icing on the cake.

MsgFiler is shareware ($8) and is available from the tow.com web site, Version Tracker, and other shareware distribution sites.

Among the new features Apple touted in Leopard was data detectors in Mail.app. The idea is that if somebody sends you an email with a street address in it, for example, Mail.app can detect that it's a street address and add it an Address Book contact with just a couple of clicks. Unfortunately, while the basic idea isn't bad, sometimes you just want to copy something and the data detectors simply get in the way (and leads, in my case at least, to some gratuitous cursing).

Well, Michael Tsai has found the solution with a hidden preference. All you have to do is type in (or copy and paste in) one line to the Terminal and the data detectors will be banished from Mail.app. Head on over to Tsai's post for full details and kiss the cursing goodbye.

[via Daring Fireball]

Most desktop messaging clients (Apple's Mail.app and Microsoft's Entourage among them) give users the option to skip loading images when reading rich-formatting emails, which both speeds up the loading/reading process and limits exposure to spammer scavenging, which can leverage embedded images to verify that the evil emails were received by a valid address. The iPhone's version of Mail, however, doesn't give users the option to turn images off, as pointed out by Stefan Seiz. This has been the case all along and hasn't been corrected in 2.0, unfortunately.

While this exposure is less of a problem if you've got good spam filtering in place, it does raise an interesting question: wouldn't an optional images-off mode be ideal if you wanted to speed up your iPhone's mail performance, or (perish the thought!) limit your data usage on a less-than-ideal service plan. Unfortunately I don't think adding features and options to Mail is within the official capacity of third-party devs, so we're going to have to wait for Apple to address this directly.

RelatedMail is a free plugin for Mail.app which "shows messages related to the currently viewed message" in a panel next to the preview pane. It does this by building an index based on message headers and content which it then uses to guess what other messages are relevant to the one you're viewing. In some ways this is similar to threading, but more sophisticated.

At present the plugin is very much in beta and has a variety of known problems, including a serious performance hit as it does its indexing. Nonetheless, it's an interesting idea that shows a lot of promise.

RelatedMail is a free download from Scott Ziegler.

[via Hawk Wings]