| Editorials
@ Applelust |
| Panther
In Depth: Mail |
© 10-27-03
Marc Messer
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August of last year, I wrote an overview
of Mail in the then newly released Jaguar version
of Mac OS X. While it still had its shortcomings,
Mail had taken a significant step forward in becoming
the email client for the Mac. Now,
a little over a year later, how has Apple improved
Mail? What features did we finally get and which ones
are we still waiting for? If you are wholly unfamiliar
with Mail, please click the overview above and read
it first.
Don't Lose That Thread
A thread is a continuous conversation that is carried
over several posts/emails. Mail can now identify a
thread and identify all emails in that thread. And
it's pretty smart about it too. It doesn't matter
who the email is from, what account it's sent to,
or what the subject is, it keeps track and lets you
find your subject of interest quickly.
 |
| Selecting
one email within a thread highlights the other
emails in that thread. |
In the example above, I sent a message from one of
my accounts to a second account... and then replied
to a third account. Each time I changed the subject
of the message. Selecting one message will highlight
all other messages that Mail identifies as being in
that thread.
 |
| Organize
your inbox by thread. |
There is also a new option in the view menu to organize
your emails by thread. As you can see in the example
above, each email within a thread is separated into
a folder of sorts for that thread. You can expand
or collapse all threads using the expanding triangle
in the leftmost column or through the View menu. Clicking
on the name of the thread will pull up a summary in
the preview panel instead of an email.
 |
| Selecting
the thread title will pull up a summary of all
of the emails in the thread. |
As someone who sometimes has dozens of conversations
going at once (you should see the Applelust writer
discussions) spanning several days or weeks, this
feature is one that I've quickly determined is a necessity.
"Under the Hood" Changes
Perhaps as important as the flashy features that
have been added to Mail, are the under the hood changes
to Mail.
Safari Rendering Engine: All html
encoded emails are now rendered using Safari. This
means faster and more accurate rendering. I noticed
immediately some emails that before I'd never seen
rendered properly now showing up quickly and correctly.
Exchange Support: In the past, this
could have been a deal breaker. If your email server
utilized Microsoft Exchange server, you were outta
luck on the Mac. Entourage brought exchange support
to the Mac at least fending off the IT types looking
for an excuse to dump all Macs from the company, and
now Mail has it as well to give Mac users a choice.
Improved Junkmail Support: When
Mail first started utilizing Junkmail support, it
was great. After a brief training period, it was easily
identifying 95% of all spam into my inboxes and was
rarely if ever misidentifying legitimate emails as
spam. I've noticed over the last year that spam has
been getting worse. I'm easily getting 5 times the
spam I was a year ago, and more is slipping through
the cracks of junkmail filters.
Panther to the rescue. Apple has improved the junkmail
support in Mail. It's identifying more spam and performance
has increased. It's increased because Mail now refuses
to download any images (most spam utilizes HTML encoding
heavily saturated in graphics) from emails that it
suspects are junk unless you tell it to. This is just
smart.
Sometimes it's the Little Things
Action Sounds: Granted, this isn't
as important to me as it used to be. Back in the day
when everyone wasn't receiving 500 email messages
daily, it was incredibly useful to hear a sound when
a new message came in, etc. Then again, it's still
very useful to know if an outgoing or incoming mail
fails. Well, Mail finally has a feature that was considered
a staple years ago. It's a feature that many will
welcome and the rest can just turn off.
S/MIME Encryption: You can now encrypt
your emails as well as use S/MIME to verify authenticity.
For some people, this will be a huge deal, but for
most people, secure email isn't necessary just yet.
Jump to Reply: Related to the threading
feature, Jump to Reply allows you to pull up the original
message that you sent by clicking on the status icon
to the left of the reply message in your inbox. This
is one of those great "another way to do something
useful" that Apple is known so well for.
Permanent BCC: Finally. In the past,
the BCC field was hidden. You could bring it up for
a specific email, but there was no way to make it
a permanent feature for every message. Select "BCC
Header" from the view menu and you have it for
every newly composed message.
Improved Attachment Support: You
now have more control over your attachments. In the
header, all attachments will be listed, and you'll
have full contextual control for each attached item,
or all of them together.
Drag and Drop Addresses: Just another
thing that makes Mail more friendly. Drag and drop
addresses from the different fields to move them.
Shift a "to" recipient to "bcc"
with a click and drag.
A Look Back at My Requests
Last year, I made three specific requests for Mail
that I hoped to see in a future version. Have any
been added?
Mail Views: From my description
last year...
Update... still no Mail Views.
Signatures for specific accounts:
If I have a personal email account and a business
email account, I would like to have separate signatures
or sets of signatures automatically for each account.
Update... nope. There is still one set of signatures.
You cannot specify sets of signatures or have them
specifically designated for different accounts.
More powerful flagging:
Why not more options like "flag for reply"
or "flag for forward." Once iCal is released,
I hope we see further integration with Mail and
flagging to specify appointments, etc. Also, a "flag
complete" would be great. Other email clients
allow you to not completely unflag a message, just
identify that it was once flagged but that task
is done.
Update... disappointingly, flagging in Mail is still
at the infant level that it was in the previous version.
A New Request
BCC Location: Why is the BCC field
located beneath the subject? Wouldn't it be fair to
assume it would sit below the CC field and above the
subject field? At the very least, shouldn't we have
the freedom to move it's location?
Conclusion
It seems that like much of the Panther upgrade, Mail's
latest update isn't revolutionary but evolutionary.
It's a mix of "things that shoulda been there
before" and "things we can now add that
we've gotten the other stuff out of the way".
Is it enough to start a mass migration from other
email clients? I guess it all depends. Those who were
waiting just for a specific feature like Exchange
support will see their last hurdle set aside and go
whole hog. But for most people, I think it'll be seen
as just another reason to upgrade to Panther from
Jaguar.
- Marc
Messer
