Mail

leopardmail.png

Mail in Leopard was one of the features I was thoroughly looking forward to from day one when Steve and his team stood up on stage an announced it. Due to the fact that I receive so many emails day in day out, it was only normal that I was excited about the forthcoming changes in Mail.app

Before I installed Leopard, the organizational factor of my tasks, emails, and notes was lacking in structure. Although all three somewhat related to each other, I was managing them from within three different applications. Mail for email, Yojimbo for notes, and Ta Da List for tasks.

Now running Leopard and Mail 3.0, I have these three main aspects (tasks, emails, and notes) sorted in one location, from within one window.

Tidbits

The new refined user interface of Mail is attractive to say the least. Im enjoying the new icons in both the toolbar and in the sidebar. Folder icons look very slick.

I feel like the sidebar of Mail has taken a sharp turn in the right direction, now with headers for main areas such as Smart Mailboxes. These all fall under one heading where they can be seen plain and clear.

The Mail Activity window in the lower left corner of the main window is a nice touch. I frequently has to check activity in Tiger by using the key command, now all that data is right in front of me and is just one glance away at any time of the day. The second I hit send on an email, the activity window updates and shows me the percentage sent, and the data transfer rate.

Notes

My notes were previously stored in a data organizational application by the name of Yojimbo, I’ve now migrated everything to the Mail notes section.

One of the first things I did upon moving my notes to Mail was change the ugly Marker Felt font to something more bearable, 12-point Helvetica.

Don’t get me started on the background of the main notes window. Basic home users who come home from work, check their email, and do a little light web browsing should enjoy the bright yellow legal notepad like design - but me - I find it severely tacky looking.

Apple, why can’t we have an option to change the background just like we can in the Finder?

Tasks

I’ve been playing around with a few different applications used for keeping hold of my tasks over the past 6 months. I can think of at least half a dozen I’ve tried off the top of my head, probably more. None have really fit the bill of what I’m looking for in a task manager, I can safely say that Mail hasn’t either, but it’s a step closer to how my ideal application would work.

The ease of creating to-dos from existing emails is a real plus as this is where many of my tasks originate. Unlike the notes, I don’t need to complain about the background design of the tasks section as it’s solid white. Much cleaner. Far better.

All Synced Up

Without diving into the core of .Mac sync and the changes made with Leopard (in this post), I’d like to somewhat highlight how handy the syncing capabilities within Mail are to me.

My current Mac inventory is a Mac Pro, however I’ll be adding a notebook to that in the next few weeks. As stated above when referring to my tasks, notes, and emails, “I feel much more in control of these things now.” .Mac Mail sync is perfect for this. The three aspects of my life I like to have complete control over are able to be taken with me, anywhere I go, with the changes replicated on the .Mac server, and in turn, on each of my machines.

If I’m at a cafe with a notebook computer and I make a change to a note, and reply to three emails in my inbox, when I sit back down in my office and open Mail, these changes are automatically synced to the office Mac Pro. Convenience at its best.

Comments

  1. #1

    Dustin → www.dustincook.ca

    They’ve made a lot of positive changes in Mail. Its a good step forward for sure.

  2. #2

    Kevin Hock

    I’m still waiting to buy my Mac Pro but am really looking forward to Mail 3.0. I’ve always thought the Mac Mail app was a bit anemic but combined with .Mac and all of these new features it really is very compelling.

  3. #3

    Brad → buffaloseven.wordpress.com

    I too have been looking forward to the changes in Mail for quite a while now.

    Having finally gotten my copy of Leopard and installed it tonight, one of the first things I went to play with was Mail, and I’m quite impressed. Apple really has seemed to follow through on what they said they were going to do, and I think it’s a much stronger program than it was before.

  4. #4

    alej744

    The new mail looks great in functionality, but the new toolbar is a joke.
    Those shiny graphite buttons shouldn’t be mixed with a unified shaded toolbar, and it’s not easy to see what’s dimmed or not at a glance.

  5. #5

    Julian Schrader → julianschrader.de

    I just switched to IMAP mail a few days before Leopard. Still had to clean some things up though, but now everything just works fine and is perfectly in sync — even mails I’m currently writing get uploaded to the drafts folder on the server constantly.

    I’m looking to getting an iPhone next week — mail is prepared!

  6. #6

    Andy

    Am I able to sync mail with my Yahoo account with IMAP?

  7. #7

    Julian Schrader → julianschrader.de

    @Andy: You should be, yes. I’m using Mail 3.0 with an IMAP account on my MediaTemple server, so this is not a special .Mac functionality but ordinary IMAP support.

    @Glenn: Maybe you could include IMAP in your post so people don’t think they have to use .Mac — GMail also offers free IMAP now.

  8. #8

    Jorge Quinteros → JorgeQuinteros

    I’ve been a fan of the application since its release so its been great to see the minor evolution of the program upon each OS release. So far so good. The RSS feature is neat but not as robust as a Netnewswire for example.

  9. #9

    Chris Thomson → christhomsonblog.com

    I really like Mail’s Data Handlers for Signatures. I changed my signature to include a bunch of useful information now, and a link to my vCard. Notes and To-dos is nice, but I really don’t find a huge use for them, I’ve never really liked the “To-do” idea. I really hate it when I open Mail, or open Mail > Preferences, it says Certificate Invalid. I switched off SSL, because I use mail.mydomain as my server, but the SSL certificate is registered to *.gridserver.com. Even with SSL turned off, it prompts me, really annoying.

    Other than that, I love the new Mail!

  10. #10

    Grant → www.grantmc.co.uk

    Woo, my email is in his inbox :D, £rd down.

    Good Article, as always!

  11. #11

    jayp80

    I’ve been using mail since I got my imac, a little over a year ago. And the new mail is a definite improvement. Being a Windows user for so many years I got used to a email client, and so none of the web based systems have been up to par. I love that they added notes and to-do’s to mail. It’s so much better then in ical. One minor grip is that so far i haven’t found a way of editing the repetition of tasks in mail. I have to open ical and edit it there. If someone has figured out how, please let me know.

  12. #12

    Angel

    I like the changes in Mail 3.0 but it’s so buggy it’s almost unusable. I’m seriously thinking about downloading Thunderbird until the problems are fixed. I’m having problems with the To-Dos duplicating and the fact that zero messages show up in my various IMAP folders. Plus it crashes frequently. iCal is even buggier than Mail (I can only make about two entries before it completely crashes). Looking at the Apple forums, I’m clearly not the only one having issues.

  13. #13

    Shawn Blanc → shawnblanc.net

    I’m out of the country so haven’t had a chance to upgrade yet. But the new mail and the sync are both something I’m looking forward to as well. Nice write-up Glenn.

  14. #14

    Grant → www.grantmc.co.uk

    What problems have you encountered with leopard, i was having this debate with Jamie Knight about if he thought leopard was undercooked and rushed he didn’t feel it did and the programs that didn’t work with leopard where the programs fault, do you think this is so?

    I think it may be undercooked but not by enough to stir up Sh**T

    cheers G

  15. #15

    Aaron

    The yellow background might be in the resources folder of the new mail.app. If it is you could probably just replace it with a solid white image of the same name.

  16. #16

    Elliott Cost → www.elliottcost.com

    Nice Review. What notebook are you going to be getting?

  17. #17

    Grant → www.grantmc.co.uk

    I love that, “.mac is perfect” part, you .mac went down, so what note book are you getting, i think you should sponsor me instead of buying the basic macbook to get the black one, Ill pay the basic prove ad you add the rest to buy the black, free advertising for 2 months on my site or more or hey a year even i would do if you done this! I will be starting video casts with an American friend using iChat aswell as that i would have a image or you sponsor for that, come on glenn tempting aint it!

  18. #18

    Richard Saunders → www.rdsaunders.co.uk

    Hi Glenn, a solution to your notes problem.

    @ Aaron, your right about the background but if you want a plain white background for notes you need to make two changes.

    Show Package Contents for the Mail APP

    Navigate to Resources

    Edit the note.css file and replace the values RGB 254,248,189 to 255,255,255 for the background color to change from yellow to white.

    This will make the note background white but you will still have a yellow gradient over the top.

    Then you need to replace the note-background-gradient.tiff file with one without a gradient, i just copied the original edited it in photoshop and deleted the gradient resaved and replaced the original in the resources folder.

    I now have a nice clean notes, if you find the lines are not clear enough edit the not-rule-horizontal.png and replace it in the resources folder.

    Notes are now nice and clean, lol except for all my notes!

  19. #19

    Glenn Wolsey → www.glennwolsey.com

    Thanks for that excellent tip Richard! Will be trying that this evening.

  20. #20

    John

    I can’t seem to make my notes and to-dos appear in .mac. In fact apple’s support pages include the following quotes:

    “With Mail in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, you can create To Do items. However, if you are using a .Mac account in Mail, you will not see To Do items in a Web browser via .Mac Webmail. Use Mail to see and edit To Do items.”
    “If you create a Note with Mail in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard … the notes cannot be edited in .Mac webmail, and may appear to be from an “unspecified-domain” with no “To” address.”
    “This is expected behavior. For the best experience with Notes, use Mac OS X Mail only.”

    What gives? Does .mac really not support syncing notes and to-dos? This seems like a huge oversight.

    Thanks

  21. #21

    Glenn Wolsey : Blog Archive : Relationship & Correspondence Building With Twitter → www.glennwolsey.com/2008/02/20/relationship-correspondence-building-with-twitter

    [...] contacts with what they’re doing, direct messaging friends with quick messages instead of an email, and sending/receiving links to newly posted media on the [...]

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