And so, another fairly quiet weekend wraps up. I went to Union Station yesterday, bought a Powerball ticket (and didn't win), mailed another book that sold on Amazon, and saw "Hellboy", which was an enjoyable distraction. Now that we've got that out of the way...
I'm currently in the second day or so of beta testing Apple Mail, and thus far, I can say that from what I've seen, it's a big improvement over the version I tried a year ago, although it still needs some work.
Mail now supports threads. This is the first client I've used that did that, so I can't really say whether the threads are well-implemented or not. It does take a little bit of getting used to; one oddity is that you may be looking at something in your inbox that's actually a thread summary, rather than an individual email, which is something I've never experienced before. I suspect I'd come to like this feature, given a bit of time.
The spam filter, pretty good in the earlier version, is now even better. I was getting about 90-95% accuracy before I even started training, and it appears to be learning very quickly. Mail also offers another nice feature, not present in the earlier version that I tested: if an HTML-enabled message is marked as spam, Mail doesn't load any images unless you click the prominently-displayed "Load Image" button. This saves time, of course, and also offers the added benefit of preventing bugs from confirming your email address. Nice touch. (One thing I do miss from Eudora is a "spam score", a numerical value from 1 to 100 that tells you the client's estimate of how likely it is that any particular email is spam. With Mail, it's strictly a "spam or not spam" proposition.)
I reported that earlier versions of Mail did not support BCC. As it happens, this is incorrect... BCC was supported, but the feature was hidden (and no information was available on it in Help, either, which is why I assumed the feature didn't exist). You also had to turn it on with each and every email in which you wanted to use it. It can now be set to appear by default every time you start a new message. Three cheers to whichever genius at Apple fixed this incredibly knuckleheaded blunder.
Another knuckleheaded blunder that's been fixed: email forwarding. In earlier versions of Mail, if you opened an email, revealed full headers, then clicked "Forward", the forwarded message would contain only brief headers, not full headers. Excuse me, but when I reveal full headers and click "Forward", I'm doing it for a reason. This now works the way it's supposed to.
Previous versions of Mail were helpless at forwarding HTML-enabled email as well. This function has been somewhat improved in the latest version of Mail -- now, at least, images and text do appear in the email, whereas originally, all my recipient/victim saw was badly garbled code. Nevertheless, there's still a good deal of room for improvement. A forwarded HTML-enabled email should at least look the same when you're composing it as it did when you received it -- which isn't the case with Mail; the message becomes pretty significantly deformed.
Mail supports multiple accounts, and it supports POP, IMAP, .Mac, and Exchange servers. (SSL is also supported, although SSL options are too limited, especially compared with Eudora's.) Each email account can be individually configured with a pretty good degree of flexibility, with one exception: you can't configure each account to be automatically checked at different times. I have three accounts, two of which I rarely use and prefer to check only once a day (since I don't like to hammer servers), whereas I prefer to check my main account once every five minutes. This can't be automated in Mail -- only a minor nuisance, but a nuisance nonetheless. Of course, there are ways to work around the problem if you use manual email checking or are fluent in Applescript, but kludges shouldn't be necessary for such relatively basic functionality.
One annoyance that I found when I originally configured my three email accounts: when I tried to create the third one, Mail told me that a certain directory path was already in use by the second account, a glitch that should not have come up since the directory path name is determined by your incoming server settings for any particular account. I'm not sure what caused this or how common it is, but it made for a pretty frustrating 20 or 30 minutes while I sorted out the problem. Ultimately, I had to delete both accounts, then create them in reverse order, which cleared everything up.
If you receive an email from someone who is in your Address Book, Mail can also be configured to let you know whether that person is on their AOL IM or iChat client. I personally have no use for this feature and leave it turned off; others, of course, may feel differently.
I'm also not a "power user" of filters -- or, as they're called in Mail, rules -- but for anyone wanting simple to intermediate filter capabilities, they're comparable. On the higher end, Eudora appears to offer more power, although Mail does offer two abilities Eudora doesn't. First, in Mail, you can filter by incoming account, and second, you can run Applescripts as a filter action. I don't know why Eudora lacks those abilities.
Mail doesn't support priority flags. Admittedly, priority flags aren't generally put to good use (so-called "high priority" emails are usually spam these days), but I don't like Apple deciding for me that it's a feature I don't need, especially when it's a simple and basic feature that would not be difficult to include. Apple, please correct this in future versions of Mail -- if we don't want priority flags, we won't use them.
Incoming attachments are handled very well in Mail: they simply appear in the body of your email, and you can decide what to do with them from there. If your friend mails you an MP3, you can even play it right in Mail without having to open another application. If you want to save the attachment, you specify where you want Mail to put it, simply by clicking on the "Save" button, which brings up a standard "Save" dialogue box. Eudora's treatment of incoming emails is sloppier: all incoming attachments are sent to the same folder, and it's up to you to move them to their final destination.
Mail's handling of outgoing attachments is much more simplistic. All attachments are encoded as AppleDouble, also known as "MIME" -- in fact, Mail offers no configuration options in this department at all. AppleDouble is supposed to work fine with both Macs and Windows machines, so perhaps this isn't such a big deal, but nevertheless, I'd rather have more flexibility, since I have occasionally had trouble in the past sending attachments to Windows users that I had to clear up by changing my attachment encoding options in Eudora.
Mail's options for handling messages on the server are too weak. There are five settings: remove from server immediately, remove when moved from Inbox, or remove after one day, one week, or one month. Those are all fine, but I'd much rather be able to decide whether to delete messages from the server on a message-by-message basis, as Eudora and Entourage both allow. Also, Mail has some problems actually removing emails from the server when it's configured to do so. For example, I have Mail configured to remove messages from the server when I move them from my Inbox, but often, the messages aren't removed, even if I wait for an hour or so and make sure that Mail has logged into the server a number of times.
Finally, in the "little things mean a lot" department. Many other clients offer a lot of small settings that you might not think much about until they're not there anymore, and in Mail, most of them aren't there. In Mail, for instance, you can't change the format of the "date received" column. All dates are age-sensitive and are shown in your time zone, and that's that: if you would prefer that Mail give the actual date of an email instead of saying "Yesterday", or if you happen to prefer that the date be shown in the sender's time zone rather than your own, you're out of luck. When you've opened an email message, the only thing you can do with it is delete it or close it -- you can't, for example, page down to the next message or page up to the previous one. You'd like to configure how Mail behaves when you close or delete that message? Mail returns you to the mailbox you were just looking at, and if you'd rather it did something else instead, that's just too bad. Return receipts, in either direction, are not supported. And so on.
One "little thing" that I'll give Mail credit for: when someone sends me an HTML-enabled email in a microscopic font, I can simply increase the font size to make the email more legible. (Why doesn't Eudora do this...?)
So what am I going to do? Well, I'm really not sure yet. I've been using Eudora 6.0.1, which is showing its age in a lot of ways. It's aesthetically displeasing, mangles the hell out of HTML-enabled email, handles attachments awkwardly, and just generally seems to think that it's still 1996. Eudora does not take advantage of any of the features of OS X that I've seen. Rather, it appears that Qualcomm simply took the original source code for Mac Classic OS and recompiled it for OS X. Even at that, though, it's still a powerful and versatile app, and it offers a number of functions and abilities that -- well, I seldom, if ever, use most of them, but I'm also uncomfortable about not having them available to me.
Mail, by way of comparison, is slickly polished and has the overall demeanor of a modern-day application, as is evidenced, for example, by its handling of HTML-enabled email, its support for threads, and its handling of incoming attachments. Mail is fully integrated with OS X and avails itself of such things as the OS X Address Book (Eudora still uses its own proprietary address book). Overall, though, Mail doesn't offer as much power or flexibility as Eudora; as is often the case with Apple software, Mail seems to think that it knows the best way for you to work, rather than allowing you to tell it how you want to work. Fortunately, it's usually right (Apple's studies on how people use computers are very thorough), but I find it rather arrogant that it doesn't even allow for the possibility that it might be wrong.
I guess a few more days of experimentation is in order.
Posted by Zathras at April 12, 2004 01:44 AM