The Wonderful and Infuriating Mail.app
Comments: 3
A week ago I set up Spam Assassin which required me to move to Apple’s Mail.app which can (or could) check Unix accounts. The new version of Mail.app no longer works with Unix accounts! Aaargh.
It does have its own built in spam filtering system, which seems quite good (its built on ‘adaptive algorithms’ which learn as you ‘train’ it) but, damn, I hate it when the rug gets pulled from under you like this. I’ll probably stick with Mail.app because the whole point of the exercise after all was less spam. Another thing in its favour is that it stores mail in a standard format (mbox) rather than Entourage’s propietary database.
There’s also a killer design flaw in Mail.app (and some other apps which place a search field in their toolbars such as the Help viewer – although the Finder seems immune to this). If you select Customize Toolbar… from the View menu and choose to view the buttons in the toolbar as text only, you deactivate the ability to use the search function. This flaw was also present in 10.1.5.
Let’s be clear about this: In Mail.app, the ability to search mailboxes for messages containing a particular string is lost if you view the toolbar buttons as text only. Choosing Find Messages… from the Find sub-menu of the Edit menu (or typing its key command – Ctrl-Cmd-F) does not work as these options simply shift focus to the search field in the toolbar (which is not present when you’ve set the view options to text only; the text tag remains but is greyed out).
This is a real howler and I hope they fix it soon.
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Posted to Computers • 2002.08.27 (Tue) • 00:20
Comments
Posted by shawn 2002.08.27, 03:16
have you submittied this via the apple feedback page? make sure you do, the only way these get fixed if someone files the bug report…
Posted by jh 2002.08.27, 12:37
Good advice. I did this last week when I moved to Mail.app after installing Spam Assassin. This seems like a fairly major screw-up, so I hope it gets some attention.
Posted by Franz 2003.01.18, 01:32
Bless you for explaining that. I just couldn’t figure out why nothing was happening. I didn’t expect Mail’s pitiful “Help” to be useful here, but I might add that I did expect it could have at least been consistent in referring to “Search” and “Find.” Isn’t there an Apple rule about the difference?
Ah well, thank goodness for community. I’ll send Apple a note as well.
Franz
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