Saturday, June 19, 2010

Apple's Mail app is Teh Suck

Just some quick thoughts of things I'd like for Apple's Mail.app to handle that it doesn't and probably never will. Considering that I got an iPad and had expected to use it as a great email device this list is particularly personal to me as Mail on the iPad is more ineptly equipped than Mail on Snow Leopard.

IMNSHO Mail on the iPad and OS X should have:

  • Support for Multiple Identities
    • This is a no brainer. Every other mail application has had support for this feature since somewhere around 1997. Having multiple "From" addresses is not the same as multiple identities. The Latter includes changes to "Name", "From", "Signature", PGP-Key
    • There are multiple use cases for this
    • When I brought this up to the reps at the Apple Store their solutions were just ridiculous:
      • Create multiple 'sender accounts' that remain 'off line' 
      • Use MobileMe (don't know how that one was supposed to help)
      • Do things a different way 
      • Use GMail or Thunderbird 
  • PGP/GPG Support
    • C'mon PGP's been around since I was in high school (and I'm in my 30s).
  • Ability to display Full-Headers
    • It's useful.
  • ServerSide Filter Support
    • Sieve plugins are available for most other Email Applications
  • Associating a default email address with a particular mail folder

I'm thinking of implementing the above in an app myself but with Apple's fickle approval process I'm reluctant to put in the time and effort only to be rejected for vague reasons.

Until I figure something else out, it's just mutt+msmtp, which I love by the way.

3 comments:

  1. That's what apple.com/feedback is all about.
    You can suggest features/fixes there directly to the engineers who make the software.
    "Teh". Heh. Nice.

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  2. I am still not thinking properly. I have had a Mac since MaxOS X (2001). I have used the MacOS Mail app to read my mail since then. From "almaren.org" (My old domain), from "mac.com", from hotmail.com, from Yahoo.com, and gmail.com. Each has a different account name, password, signature, outgoing server, (hotmail only does POP3, Yahoo sucks, and the rest are IMAP).

    But I take it that this is not what you're talking about. SEE?? I AM confused. :-)
    [Yeah, stay off my lawn!!]

    JB
    ==

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  3. @DSbeerf No. I'm talking about a simple type of use case. Say two people work for a small company (4 employees tops). They run their own mail server and manage multiple 'products'. There's the company email domain, COMPANY.com and a separate domain for each product: COMANY-hosting.com, COMPANY-consulting.com, etc. It's all one company but each of the 4 employees has multiple addresses at which they receive email. The email all comes in on the same account, user@COMPANY.com, via iMAP. When an email message is addressed to john@COMPANY-hosting.com and he replies he can only send it through his john@COMPANY.com 'identity' unless he wants to create a separate account for every domain owned by the company on which he might receive/send email.

    Also, suppose that there are three people (out of the four) who do billing. So they setup billing@COMPANY.com which is a list/alias that goes to jan, mike, and dave. When dave gets a message from a user he doesn't want that user to bug him directly (dave@COMPANY.com) he wants to be able to respond as billing@COMPANY.com so that he isn't the 'go-to' guy for every customer that he helps. Mail doesn't support this type of operation without creating a 'new account' for each email address that one might use.

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