Mail Improvements in OS X 10.9.2
It seems to happen like clockwork: I release a book about some Apple product or service, and within a week, Apple updates its offerings in such a way as to invalidate what I wrote. But this time I had a tiny bit of luck: Apple’s 10.9.2 update (see “10.9.2 Fixes Critical SSL Security Bug, Adds FaceTime Audio,” 25 February 2014) was released hours before we planned to publish my new book, “Take Control of Apple Mail,” and that gave me just enough time to revisit problems in previous versions of Mail and edit the manuscript to reflect the changes.
I’m pleased to report that the new version of Mail in 10.9.2 (version 7.2, build 1874) is far better than its predecessors, about which I complained mightily in “Mail in Mavericks Changes the Gmail Equation” (22 October 2013) and (to a slightly lesser extent) “Mail in Mavericks: Is It Safe Yet?” (11 November 2013). That meant I was able to delete quite a few paragraphs from my book detailing bugs and other infelicitous changes. But, to keep this in perspective: Mail is now at the point where it should have been when Mavericks was released.
Since those paragraphs will no longer be in the book, I wanted to report what I’ve found. I’ll begin with the usual disclaimers: not every problem has disappeared, and what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for everyone. As evidenced by the long list of comments on this article, plenty of people are still experiencing significant problems. Even so, this is the first version of Mail in Mavericks that feels reasonably reliable, and it’s about time!
As always, Apple’s own claims about what has changed are vague and incomplete. The relevant lines from the release notes are as follows:
- Includes general improvements to the stability and compatibility of Mail
- Improves the accuracy of unread counts in Mail
- Resolves an issue that prevented Mail from receiving new messages from certain providers
- Improves VoiceOver navigation in Mail and Finder
- Improves compatibility with Gmail Archive mailboxes
- Includes improvements to Gmail labels
That all sounds encouraging, if not terribly clear. So, take Apple’s list with a grain of salt. Here’s what my tests have shown:
- Unified mailbox behavior: In 10.8 Mountain Lion and before, you could drag a message from any mailbox to the unified Inbox icon (which contains the Inboxes for all your accounts), and Mail would move it to the Inbox of the account where the message was stored — unless it was stored locally and thus not in any account, in which case it would be moved to the account shown first under the unified mailbox. The same went for other unified mailboxes — Drafts, Sent, Junk, Trash, and Archive. However, in 10.9.0 and 10.9.1, this convenience feature was gone; when dragging a message to any unified mailbox, you had to expand it and select a specific account underneath. Now, in 10.9.2, we’re back to the more convenient Mountain Lion
behavior. - Gmail special mailboxes: In the first two releases of Mavericks, although you could uncheck the Store Draft Messages on the Server, Store Sent Messages on the Server, Store Junk Messages on the Server, or Move Deleted Messages to the Trash Mailbox checkboxes on the Mailbox Behaviors view of your Gmail account preferences, as soon as you reopened the Preferences window, you’d see that they were checked again. In other words, you were obligated to store Gmail drafts, sent, junk, and trash email on the server whether you wanted to or not. Furthermore, Mail forced you to use the default locations for Gmail’s Drafts, Sent, Junk, and Trash mailboxes. (That is, if you selected another mailbox and chose Mailbox > Use This Mailbox For,
the submenu was dimmed.) Both of those annoyances are now gone; you can store special Gmail mailboxes on the server or not, and if you do, you can choose nonstandard mailboxes if you prefer. -
Gmail mailbox order: Previously, you could not rearrange Gmail mailboxes in Mail’s sidebar; those at the top level of your Gmail account were always in alphabetical order (although, strangely, mailboxes nested within another mailbox could still be reordered). Now you can reorder Gmail mailboxes, but not the special-purpose mailboxes Gmail creates automatically, such as Important and Chats.
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Gmail AppleScript problems: If you had an AppleScript that targeted a Gmail mailbox other than Inbox or Archive/All Mail, it would fail, because AppleScript saw all the other Gmail mailboxes as being empty. Now AppleScripts can again see into Gmail mailboxes properly.
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Exchange reliability: Users with Exchange accounts had found that Mail checked for new messages on launch, but not afterwards; you had to either quit and reopen Mail or take your accounts offline and then check for new messages manually (as described in this Apple support article). That has now been fixed, at least for most users.
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Addressing to Smart Groups: The Contacts app lets you create groups of addresses — for example, a Family group that contains the contact records of your family members. You can type a portion of a group’s name and Mail autocompletes it just as it would for an individual name. Autocomplete does not work for Smart Groups (so, that much hasn’t changed since 10.9.1), but now, if you type the entire, exact name of the Smart Group and type a comma or press Tab or Return, Mail at least displays the group name in a nice blue bubble, and the Smart Group does in fact work — Mail sends the message to the correct addresses.
That’s as much as my testing has revealed so far. I wouldn’t be surprised to find more improvements (or new bugs, for that matter). I can’t yet say whether other issues with Gmail or Exchange have been dealt with. And although Apple may have improved the accuracy of unread counts (perhaps for Smart Mailbox badges), I’ve read multiple reports that the badge on Mail’s Dock icon still isn’t accurate. Numerous other issues remain, as well, but on the whole the bugs seem to be fewer and less severe than before.
If you’ve noticed additional improvements, things that are still broken, or new bugs, please share them with us in the comments. And if you ever feel as though your email is out of control, my brand new 175-page book “Take Control of Apple Mail” will help you become more productive with Apple Mail in 10.9 Mavericks and iOS 7, providing essential advice for Gmail, iCloud, IMAP, and Exchange accounts. It reveals hidden interface elements, shows how to customize Mail, explains my strategy for avoiding email overload, demystifies encrypted email, and provides solutions to common problems, among many other things.
Have you noticed that clicking on a new Mail notification causes the message to display in a new window instead of using the exisiting Mail window?
I hadn't noticed that, no—but then, I rarely click Mail notifications. Thanks for pointing it out!
Is there any fix for this yet? It's so annoying!
Please tell me how to stop this annoying process. Give me back the original treatment of clicking a notification.
As far as I'm aware, you can't change this behavior.
There is a plugin called Herald that causes Mail to handle notifications differently. I haven't tried it and don't know if it will help at all in this situation, but it might be worth looking at:
http://erikhinterbichler.com/apps/herald/
The most needed function in a Mail - character encoding is still missing!! How can this be is beyond my comprehension.
What do you mean by "character encoding"?
I know mail properly handles Unicode, but presumably you mean something different.
The message > text encoding menu which Apple deleted is essential so you can choose the encoding of mail you send when Apple's default will not work with your recipients and so you can change the encoding of mail you receive when the sending app has botched it. It is really hard to believe Apple could be so stupid as to not put this back in, every other mail program has it.
I just got a new iMac running 10.9.4 and this is still a problem. Any word if Apple is goign to restore the View > Message > Text Encoding feature? I don't see any system-wide way of fixing this either. I have text from an older Mac that displays special characters all wrong in Mail.
Apple doesn't discuss future product changes. But given what I've seen historically, I'd be surprised if Text Encoding returned.
Has anyone experienced Mail occasionally sending dupllicate emails to recipients in the Ail version preceeding 10.9.1.
I sent a duplicate mail yesterday by mistake in 10.9.2. I hit command shift D twice, the second time before the window had animated closed. Minor bug. Don't plan on doing that again.
Why do people still use google mail? It's non-standard handling of mail boxes has always meant it's a pain to use via IMAP. Google farms your mail for data to sell to advertisers so there is no privacy. Being presented within a web browser means it breaks with UI conventions with the OS you're running it on.
Use a real IMAP email service with Mail.app or any other IMAP client and get something that has none of these problems.
I still do cause it has one of the best spam filters out there.
Bingo! Best Spam filter!
I use Gmail for several reasons:
1. Spam filter.
2. Server-side filtering.
3. Push notifications in iOS.
4. Unlike Mail on iOS, the Gmail apps shows my replies in email threads.
5. Multiple inboxes that automatically sort out the non-spam crap. (bacn, as some call it)
6. Powerful search.
7. Labels are more useful than folders.
8. I have a personal gmail.com address that I've used for a decade. It would be a pain to move, and Gmail just works.
However, after Mavericks, I no longer try to shoehorn Gmail into the Mail app. And with the deficiencies in Apple Mail on both the Mac and iOS, I have no interest to. Plus, the Web interface has push notifications in Chrome, and I have Gmail set as my system default email, so I have no reason to switch.
You don't have to give up #1 & #8 necessarily. You can tell Gmail to forward your email to an IMAP account. And when you send mail out of your IMAP account, make sure you send it with your Gmail address in the From line.
Yes, it messes with the workflow a bit.
Not sure I agree that Gmail "just works". If you want any form of security (e.g., encryption), the Gmail web interface and mobile apps are entirely useless.
Yes, but then you can just use a client that does offer signing and encryption with your Gmail account. You aren't prevented from doing it; you just have to employ additional software.
The main issue I was experiencing was that Mail.app wouldn't actually synch/download new email from my gmail account unless I manually selected "Synchronize all accounts" under the 'Mailbox' menu. This seems to have been fixed with 10.9.2. Mail is pushing through as it should which is a huge relief...and agreed, is the way it should have been released originally with 10.9.0.
Well, sad to report after posting this comment yesterday...I woke this morning to find Mail was once again having the original problem of emails re-appearing in the inbox after deleting them...not synching properly and making it worse than it was before 10.9.2. Sigh...
Two annoyances that still persist:
1. I still get Mail "Writing changes to disk", where it seems to be touching thousands of mailboxes. As a consequence:
2. I have huge Time Machine backups. As an example, 5 minutes after a Time Machine backup completed, with only Mail activity in between, and I apparently needed to backup another 2.96GB. Sigh
I experienced this too and worked around it by excluding ~/Library/Mail from the Time Machine backups.
Making your backups faster by not backing up your most persona data is a bad idea for most people and a terrible thing to suggest to the internet, where people might not understand the ramifications.
Don't do this unless you're *certain* you understand what it means.
Very small gripe, if it even qualifies as a gripe at all: I'm still missing the pre-Mountain Lion ability to mark a single message in a thread as 'unread' with the mouse - there is no 'right-click' dialog with the command while over the message itself, only when you go back to the list/preview on the left - and then when you do get the ability to select 'Mark as Unread', you'll find the command marks every message in the thread as unread.
Of course, the ability to mark a single message unread IS still possible - you just have to use the key command Shift-Command-U - but that isn't that convenient really, when doing the casual "mouse and scroll" one-handed reading I (and likely many others) do.
Oh well.
As lovely as all these improvements are, Mail is still pretty badly borked. For example, it still shows me the "Mail Upgrade" dialog box every. single. time. I. launch. it.
It also still seems to want to re-download messages, both from my Gmail accounts and my AOL accounts pretty frequently, though that may be a little bit better--I'll know more in a couple of days.
It's really disappointing that Apple broke a program that worked so reliably in Mountain Lion (and before) and *still* hasn't managed to fix it. What were they thinking? WHY do they seem to be completely unable to fix it?
I have not seen this behavior, and I haven't heard of other people experiencing it with 10.9.2. It makes me suspect there's something unusual about your Mac or the way Mail is set up. If it were me, I'd try removing all my accounts, deleting Mail's preferences, and adding the accounts all back, one at a time. A pain, but it would provide useful troubleshooting information.
Well, it's documented in various places around the net, such as https://discussions.apple.com/message/23468863#23468863
(And the "solution" there doesn't work, BTW, I've tried it.)
I'm now trying to rebuild the envelope index, as described at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5719788?start=0&tstart=0, but that'll take a long time as I have tens of gigabytes of email.
Deleting and recreating all the accounts isn't an option for me--it would take hours, and I don't have that kind of time. (I have tens of gigabytes of email, both locally on my mac and in maybe 10 different IMAP accounts, and recreating all of that from scratch would be a nightmare.)
The real question is why Apple broke it so badly in Mavericks, and why they haven't bothered ti fix it yet. They should be embarrassed...
The thread you mention on Apple's discussion forums is all pre-10.9.2. I was aware this happened for some people previously, but as I said, this is the first I've heard under 10.9.2.
I do hope you have success rebuilding the envelope index, and I understand how time-consuming that can be.
It could be the case that the underlying problem has already been fixed, but that your data got messed up somewhere along the way, and Mail can only work with what it's got. As in: we've fixed your DVR now, but it was broken when True Detective was on, so the fix doesn't restore the missing programming.
I've had this on 10.9.0, and the behaviour persisted on one machine, but not the other, in 10.9.1. Not sure yet whether it's persisted in 10.9.2: that machine is at home.
I did install the GM before 10.9.0 was released, so that may be the source of the problem.
The release notes may say "Improves the accuracy of unread mail counts" but after the 10.9.2 update, the 7 phantom unread mails I have had since I first installed Mavericks persist.
Re-index your spotlight in order to fix the phantom email problem. Hopefully it won't come back with this update.
Thanks. That seems to have done the trick, but it's early days yet.
Oops. Spoke too soon. Now I have almost 600 messages in my unread smart folder—all of them have been read.
Wow that is strange. I never had old ones come back after re-indexing and since upgrading to 10.9.2 I haven't had any issues with phantom email so far.
Finally got rid of the problem: I went one-by-one through my On My Mac mailboxes and rebuilt each one. Finally, I found one of them that, after rebuilding, indicated the same number of "unread" messages. After marking them all as read, the phantom unread mails finally went away.
I wish they would seriously make mail better for Exchange and power users. You can not add folders directly and sorting/grouping of emails is a pain. I would also throw in better attachment support. I don't need to see the image of the PDF in the email. For a major update I wish they would take some of the basic items from Outlook and improve Mail.
Be sure to do an Apple bug report and request the changes!
The still haven't fixed the bug I reported in 10.0 (yes, the beta of OSX, over a decade ago) with regard to bad mail headers created when sending messages to a group, but not revealing the recipients. They've broken it in several ways, but still don't seem to be able to spell "undisclosed recipients:;" properly. They did go through a period of writing "undisclosed recipients:< >;" which was so close to being right that it hurt.
In the 10.9.2, they seem to have given up respecting an unchecked "Preferences...composing...when sending to a group, show all member addresses". Mail pretends to respect it, then expands the group on sending anyway. This is a complete failure to respect privacy, or to show the user what's happening.
One annoyance still remains for me: when moving a message out of the inbox, it briefly pops back into the list before disappearing again.
Same for me. While it's nothing that "breaks" email for me it is really annoying.
Can anyone confirm if this annoyance has been fixed for him/her?
Is there something I should try (like deleting and re-adding the account? I would really like to avoid that)
Mine no longer shows the message reappearing and disappearing in the list, but I /do/ still get a notification about the "new" email.
This is happening for me as well. When I no longer want a message in my inbox, I move it to All Mail so it can be archived. This always worked fine in the past, but today these messages keep showing back up in the inbox.
On a related note, I still have not seen a decent explanation of how to use the Archive button to remove a message from the Inbox but keep it in All Mail. It seems to create a completely separate "Archive" folder/label as well, which does not seem very clean to me. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I would be very grateful.
From your description, it sounds as though the All Mail label is hidden from IMAP clients on the Gmail site. That is, when I had it hidden, this is the behavior I saw, and when I changed it to no longer be hidden, this behavior stopped. If yours isn't hidden, I don't have a good explanation.
Thanks for the suggestion, but my All Mail label is not hidden. Right clicking and moving messages from my Apple Mail inbox to the proper All Mail folder worked fine for me until the 10.9.2 update, when the messages now keep reappearing in my inbox. I don't want to use the delete button because I have my setup configured to send those messages to the trash, and I don't want to use the Archive button, because I find that redundant and am trying to figure out a way to use the Archive button to send my messages to the proper All Mail folder, if possible...
Clicking Archive does move Gmail messages to Archive (All Mail) if things are configured properly. That is how it is supposed to work, and that' sweat happens for me. I can't explain why it isn't doing that for you.
Does it also create a separate "Archive" label/folder for you, in addition to letting the message remain in All Mail? That's the part I don't like - having 2 different archive locations and an unnecessary label/folder.
No, it did not do that for me. If it did so for you, and everything is set up as I described, I can't explain it.
I'll do some more troubleshooting. Thanks for the help!
Still no option to “Show plain text alternative.” Since 10.9 it’s just gone, like Keyser Söze.
defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE
Nope. That doesn't work in Mavericks.
I've got a Google Apps account that I use Mail to access, and I've found this bug on two different Macs that I've updated to 10.9.2.
Whenever I click on a message in one of my longstanding Smart Mailboxes, it instantly causes a crash. Clicking on the same message in the inbox does not cause a crash.
Of course, I rely on Smart Mailboxes heavily, so this is super disruptive. Joe, have you seen this, or has anyone else? Thanks.
I haven't seen that. But it's fantastic. Do you know how hard it is to crash Mail on purpose? This may be the easiest way yet.
Why are you focusing on mail's gmail shortcomings? The app *still* does not download new mail from a standard IMAP server, gmail or not. That's THE BASIC function of a mail program -- downloading mail. You still have to manually take all accounts offline, then take them back online in order to get it to download mail. I have to do this repeatedly, all day long. Four months and we're on the .2 update, and it still won't download new mail. It's time or a replacement mail program.
I'm not seeing that problem with regular IMAP accounts, and didn't even in 10.9.1. In fact, this is the first report I've heard of this problem in 10.9.2, and that could point to something unusual about your setup.
Mail 7.2 has stopped downloading my ISP's email either automatically or set to check every minute. I have to get the email manually. I have 10.9.2. I have spent hours on the phone with both my cable company and with Apple with no solution yet. RCN had me change the incoming server to imap.rcn.com, with no difference. Any ideas?
Complete guess based on no evidence: In the Accounts Advanced settings for that account, find the "Use IDLE Command if the server supports it" checkbox. Reverse whatever setting you find.
(While you're there - make sure "Include when automatically checking for new messages" is checked! These are the only two settings I can think of that somehow distinguish between background and manual updates.)
I just noticed something that's been bugging me since Mavericks first released.
I've never emptied my Trash folder, and used to use it as kind of a huge archive to search against. When I upgraded to Mavericks, everything older than one month was deleted. At the time, I noticed it in the gmail web interface, and couldn't figure out how it happened.
Turns out, in Mailbox Behaviors, "Permanently erase deleted messages when" had been set to One Month Old. I just changed it back to Never, so hopefully things will get back to normal. At least now I know what was causing it.
Maybe that's not the way to use the trash... At home you don't usually go through it months later, do you? Use an archive folder or something other than trash.
I don't rely on it; it was just a nice side benefit of never emptying it.
For me, the biggest problem with Mail is how it sends all the images as inline attachments (Content-disposition: inline), instead of regular attachments (Content-disposition: attachment). This has been going on at least since Tiger and gives headaches to me and my coworkers using Outlook on Windows. I am using Attachment Tamer to fix this mess, but it stopped working in 10.9.2. I guess I'll finally switch to another email client.
I agree. Just attach the document and show a list of attached items. Nothing fancy.
All plugins need to be updated whenever Mail is updated; you need to give the developers at least a few hours before giving up! ;-)
http://lokiware.info/download/Attachment-Tamer-3.1.14b6.dmg
Joe
From many Apple Support Community forums discussions on the topic:
The terminal command to disable in-line attachments (attachments appear as icons):
defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing 1
To terminal command to (re-)enable in-line attachments once disabled (attachments appear as documents displayed in-line):
defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing 0
Still broken: Addressing a message to a group composed of other groups results in *no* addresses being added to the To or Cc fields.
Or is it just my Mac?
I for 2 on my issues:
1) Mail now moves messages in smart mailboxes marked as Junk to the appropriate Junk Mailbox rather than leaving them in place.
2) Update: I wrote too soon. The links that failed to open before are now failing to open on my iMac. So, no fix here.
Original text below:
On my 2013 iMac, control-clinking a link consistently ones the linked URL in the background. However, that still fails on my 2012 MacBookAir in the same contexts where it previously failed. It's possible some random old file is causing an issue. When I get a chance, I'll check some logs.
Anyone know if the delete behaviour is still broken when in conversation view?
By broken, what I mean is that sometimes when I delete an email, the highlight stays on the current row. Other times, however, it moves to the previous line.
The problem is that I have a keystroke (Cmd-D) set up to delete emails, so when I type Cmd-D, I need to watch the inbox and see which email the highlight ends up on.
If it's the previous one, I have to use the mouse to move the highlight down where it should be.
There seems to be some subtle change in the behavior, which I haven't pinned down yet - though my subconscious pattern recognizer has because I find I can guess more easily what it will do.
The behavior *used* to be (roughly): Move in the direction of the last explicit move (due to an arrow key or mouse click selection), except that if that would take you to an already-read message while the other direction would take you to an unread one, go to the unread one instead. Usually - there seem to be additional special cases. It's those special cases that seem to have changed a bit.
Has anyone seen this problem with Gmail?
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5941165?start=0&tstart=0
I've have the same problem, like many others.
Fixed my Mavericks previous inability to connect to MS XP netbook as a wi fi print server. Very smooth, everything works. Very pleased.
Joe, Thanks for the article. Unfortunately, in 10.9.2, Mail.app is still not synchronizing the Gmail Web inbox. If Mail.app is open, and a message is received, if I read, archive, or delete that same message at gmail.com, in iOS, or using the Gmail app, the change is incredibly still not reflected in Mail.app. No special settings here. Still broken though. The only way it seems to sync the inbox is Mailbox>Take All Accounts Offline, and then put them back online. Amazing.
Agreed, same problem here. Makes Mail almost useless for me.
I sometimes click on a message in Mail Inbox and it just disappears into thin air - Poof! Not into Trash - in fact, I cannot retrieve it. Does anyone else have this?
It only happens about 2-3 times a week, and follows no pattern I can discern.
-- except occasionally when a reply coincidentally comes in just as I click, and then takes the preceding message to a new place in the queue.
that happens to me occasionally too. i've found that the disappearing messages go to the Archive folder.
Do Apple mail "rules" identify words in hidden headers?
A bunch of junk comes in with varied phony sender names, but the common "http://www.acme.com" in the hidden [shift-command H] headers
I'd like a rule to throw all such spam in the trash.
Sorry, but no. I've wanted that behavior for years, but Mail rules don't look in hidden headers.
Don't know what you mean by 'hidden' headers, but Mail rules can be configured to look in any header line: down the bottom of the Conditions list is 'Edit header list'. Follow that to add your own like mailing list.
You are quite right; I stand corrected. If you use the Edit Header List command to define a specific hidden header, you can indeed get a rule to examine that header. What a rule can't do is search the hidden headers generally, without knowing the name of the particular header where some information may be. For example, if you want a rule to match if a certain domain name appeared _anywhere_ in the headers, that won't work, not even if you're searching the entire message content.
Unless the "Rules" has been fixed, Mail still doesn't measure up for my needs.
What is it about rules that wasn't working for you?
I fail to understand this obsession with getting Gmail to work properly with Mail, or with any client — or with using Gmail at all. Is the attraction rooted in the illusion that it's 'free'?
For the time you're wasting on this, you could get a domain for $10, pay a few dollars a month for hosting, and have simple, manageable, reliable IMAP mail service. Sync your Gmail history to the new host, if needed, and never look back.
To clarify, a bit: I really appreciate Joe's relentless effort to sort this crap out and publish his findings — it's the best commentary I've come across on the subject, by far. And while I can understand the resistance to 'changing my email address', the reality is not nearly as scary or complicated as the anticipation of it — and the benefits of dumping the Byzantine mess that is Gmail far outweigh the inconvenience of doing it.
bluetooth forgets your connectio˜. bluetooth will disply your device but wont connect to it until re-pair it. this sucks if u r disabled & need help
A really bad bug, which I reported to Apple and was confirmed as a duplicate, still exists. If you delete a mail message with Option+Delete, which deletes the message but does not select another right after, it will permanently delete the message, as opposed to sending it to the Trash mailbox. This behavior started I believe in 10.9.0. I cannot believe they did not fix a known destructive bug like this. But as a former mutt user, I'm used to messages being truly deleted anyway. :)
That's not a bug, it's an option to bypass the trash folder. I use it all the time to delete messages -- such as spam -- that I want to nuke permanently.
Can you provide a link to documentation for that? Apple seems to define that keystroke as, "Prevent the next message from being automatically selected (and marked as read)".
Thanks.
You're right, of course. I was looking, by trial and error, for a shortcut to nuke messages instantly. That's what I wanted and that's what I got. So let me rephrase myself: IMHO it's not a bug, it's an option...
Understood. So unless Apple specifies that this deletes messages with extreme prejudice, I consider it a bug.
You're aware that's what that the traditional meaning for the option key is to modify behaviour, right? So if command-delete deletes a message by throwing it in the trash, command-option-delete should do something different. Deleting instantly makes sense.
However, the command key should be required and I don't think it is. Have you reported that?
The delete key alone (without Cmd) moves messages to trash on my machine. And then there is Cmd-x...which bypasses the trash the same as Opt-delete. Curiouser and curiouser.
In fact the help for Mail, under Delete Messages, says that Option-Delete modifies the delete behaviour so that the next message isn't automatically selected.
MAIL is not totally fixed. The issue of SMTP not functioning properly remains for many of us. Some can send SMTP but only if SSL is turned off for sending; others cannot still send at all. This with today's update. Inexcusable at the beginning, totally inexcusable now. Same settings in prior OS versions worked fine, no problems. Idiotic.
I still have to remove unedited downloads from ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads/ manually, although I've chosen "Remove when Mail Quits" in Mail.app preferences...
I talk about this in the other article about Mail we posted today:
http://tidbits.com/article/14548
I've chosen an option "When Mail Quits" to delete attachment copies in the Mail Downloads folder, but the files retain indefinitely.
This hint works in Mac OS 10.8.x, not in 10.9.x (at least on my MBP)
You must either remove the attachment from the message (Message > Remove Attachments) or delete the message—and _then_ quit Mail. But as I say in the other article, this doesn't remove the attachment from the Mail Downloads folder, only from the Attachments folder buried _deep_ inside ~/Library/Mail.
The issue I've got is pretty much all my mail going into Junk since I upgraded to Mavericks in addition to the 10.8 experience of it failing to quit when asked.
I wonder if they've finally fixed these issues
I'd reset the junk mail database: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11779?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
GMail support is still broken, any email which is in folders (i.e. labels) doesn't get marked as read on my computer if I've read it on my phone or the GMail website.
Hmm... Mine is working fine in this regard, i just tested several emails both on phone and on Mail.
Gmail is still not fixed for me. Messages in Inbox and some labels are missing in Mail. Account Info shows correct count of messages for each Mailbox/Label but Message Viewer window has lower counts of messages and messages are missing. Same issues in personal Google account and company Google Apps account.
Also, if I deselect Show All Mail in IMAP, then all messages can be seen in Inbox and all mailboxes. Problem only happens when Show All Mail in IMAP is selected.
One major complaint for me is that individual messages still take a long time to open. Mavericks in general has made my MBPro run much slower than in MtnLion.
Minor annoyances:
1. No unread msg count in the Dock
2. No spinner ball next to inboxes when checking for new mail - not a tragedy but i liked that
3. You have to open a sent message to use the Send Again function. You used to be able to just highlight the message.
If you use POP mail instead of IMAP, virtually none of these problems ever exist. I've never understood the reason that so many people prefer IMAP. The email is not where I keep things that I need to reference from multiple places and locations - receiving things as email is the "end of the road" for the item. Once it gets there, if it needs to be acted on it gets moved - either to a calendar item, downloaded into a folder, etc. It is RARE that I need to go back to an email. For work, that is another story - we live by email (Outlook/Exchange/BB). Maybe that is one of the reasons my personal email is so different - but POP is so much easier. :)
For my feelings on IMAP, see:
http://tidbits.com/article/13692
I think you're very much the exception if you don't need to be able to see email from more than one device or go back to saved email.
POP mail is the worst. If you pull it down and delete it from the server, it's only available on that one device. If you read emails on your phone all day, when you go back to your computer you'll have to mark them as read all over again. I cannot count how many times (over 10 years ago) that i've had numerous duplicates because of the POP mail i've left on the server. VERY inefficient!
The "Apply Rules" menu option now works in 10.9.2 for the Sent mailbox. FWIW: IIRC it wasn't limited to the sent mailbox.
Haven't read all the comments, but filed two bugs (well just via the comment function in Mail) and one of the bugs seem new to Mail in 10.9.2.
1. groups are expanded to all addresses no matter what settings you have in mail if you want to edit a draft later or send a message again. If you got hundreds of addresses in a group that could potential crash Mail ... .
2. Send again function that always worked up until Mavericks via cmd+shift+d is still not working and I need to use it daily ... .
Stability, functionality has been improved otherwise quite much.
(Safari hanged though and couldn't load pages as the Webkit plugin crashed and it has always had problems in Mavericks, if you look in Activity Monitor, but otherwise it is also somewhat more stable.)
I activated "All mail" for IMAP when I read a tip about that earlier.
Should I remove this setting now with OS X 10.9.2?
I would leave all Gmail settings at their defaults, which includes All Mail being enabled.
What do you do if showing All Mail leads to messages missing in Mail and all messages can be seen when you hide All Mail?
I'm not sure what you mean by all messages being seen when you hide All Mail. But in any case, the two things you can try are removing and re-adding your Gmail account (and giving it a good long while to resynchronize), and/or rebuilding any mailbox that seems to be missing messages.
If I don't have Show All Mail selected then I can see all of the messages in each label in a mailbox. If I select Show All Mail then I cannot see some of the messages in a label in a mailbox. When Show All Mail is selected the message counts in Get Account Info are correct but the message counts in the Message Viewer don't match, they are lower than Get Account Info. I have tried both of your suggestions multiple times on each version of Mavericks Mail but this is still an issue for me.
For example when Show All Mail in IMAP is selected Get Account Info reports 932 messages in a label/mailbox, but the Message Viewer only shows 926 messages, 6 messages are cannot be seen. If I deselect Show All Mail in IMAP then both Get Account Info and the Message Viewer show 932 messages.
Sorry, I don't have a solution for you.
As I remember All mail is not checked as default. I don't remember unchecking it in the past.
Hi. Still getting the 'Writing [a bazillion] changes to disk' issue. Also, is anyone else experiencing this problem? Since upgrading to Mavericks 'remove attachment' has turn evil... the entire message disappears... eventually it, and the attachment, turn up in the trash.
Not the desired effect really... :-(
I had no issues with GMail in 10.9.0 or 10.9.1, so I don't notice anything different here.
Most annoyingly, Mail still has a habit of occasionally leaving a stray message hanging around in "Drafts" after sending it.
I called Apple about this and was told, with a sigh of regret by the tech, "That is expected product behavior in Mavericks Mail, I'm sorry"
Updated as I walked out last night and this morning, for the first time in recent memory, Exchange mail came in without the (my) expletives! Maybe in Season 14 of The Walking Dead, we'll find out that Apple had the cure all along and was waiting for a special occasion to release it to the general public!
Since the initial Mavericks gMail issues, i've simply hid the All Mail folder from IMAP via the gmail web settings. Hasn't caused a problem (having a second copy of ALL my mail is ridiculous in terms of disk space cost!). BUT, i'm not sure what the Mail.app Archive folder is...
In Mavericks, it's no longer necessary or helpful to hide All Mail. You will NOT get a second copy (or even more) of each message, as used to be the case. It really is best now to leave Gmail settings at their defaults.
Would you suggest to make the All Mail folder the Archive folder? Or is that one of the new defaults?
Right, the Archive mailbox IS the All Mail mailbox for Gmail, if you leave All Mail enabled. It even says Archive (All Mail). You don't need to do anything.
I believe the "Search" function in Apple Mail (Mavericks) is not working properly with a Gmail account. If I do a search query, all my results will have two LOCATION outcomes, either Inbox-"my email account" or Archive - "my email account" (All Mail). The actual folder (or label) location does not show up.
I have tried hiding the All Mail folder on IMAP from within the Gmail Settings, and this apparently fixes the problem, but I am no longer able to access the All Mail Label from within Apple Mail.
Does anyone have a solution for this? Is this a bug? Is this how it's supposed to work? Before Mavericks I never had a Search problem. I am on 10.9.2
I have a similar problem with 10.9.2 and Gmail, the search either shows just the version in the Archive or both the Archive and the local mailbox. It's not consistent. I tried having (All Mail) not show in IMAP and then the search does not work at all. [Edit] Also have discovered that if I don't show (All Mail) in IMAP that messages in the Inbox do not appear.
After disabling (hiding) All mail did you wait a day or so before you verified things. There is a lot of re-synching that has to go on when enabling or disabling All mail.
The day I upgraded, with All Mail showing in IMAP I found when I did a search I got inconsistent results, sometimes only the email appeared in the All Mail box even when it had been moved to a local mail box. In my post above I referred to All Mail as Archive which may of caused your confusion -- in Mail they are the same. So I tried hiding All Mail in IMAP. When I did that the mail in the Inbox was also hidden. I went back to showing All Mail and after a day the searches improved and have continued to improve. Now searches only show the local mail box even if the mail is still also in All Mail. I tested hiding All Mail again and this time the Inbox mail was not hidden. Presumably it just takes time to sync. I'm leaving All Mail showing in IMAP and just ignoring it in Mail. That's the default and I believe what Joe Kissell has recommend.
When you say "local folder" are you referring to a folder that resides "On My Mac" or on a folder within the Gmail Folder Structure that would appear as a Label in the Gmail Web Interface?
I have 2 gmail accounts configured on 3 different computers and all are behaving the same way. The search result will NOT show the folder I moved it to but instead will only show the Archive - "my account" (all mail) location. As a so-so solution, I wish I would get duplicate results, both the actual folder where it resides and the all mail folder, but that is not the case.
Do you have anything configured in the IMAP Prefix?
I want to avoid using the Hide All Mail from IMAP option.
Why do you need All mail when messages show in their (singular) proper folder? I am confused by your statement and question - I see things twice but when I disable on of the sources (All mail) I can't see it.
I have over 200 labels (folders), so sometimes I don't remember where I filed an email. So when I do a SEARCH within the Mail application (in the search bar), the results I get have the following possible location outcomes: Inbox, Sent, Trash, Junk, Archive - All Mail. In other words, there are no results that show the actual location (folder) that the email is located in. I am asking if there is any configuration that will allow the SEARCH query within Mail show results that provide the actual location (folder) of the email I am looking for. Hope this clears your confusion.
Oh, and by the way. There are email that have been archived directly from the inbox or have for some awkward reason been unlabeled, hence only exist on the All Mail folder. This is why I would choose to keep All Mail visible.
My smart mailbox no longer display a count nor do they display anything at all in them, while I know there is thing in them, because the inbox show things...
Hate to break it to all you Google haters but I just setup my ages old Yahoo email in Mavericks 10.9.2 Mail.app and it doesnt even work at all. Doesnt receive messages or send.
Joe,
My issue is, I use Office 2011 as most of our business customers are the US Government so it helps with compatibility (not to mention I just like Office better than Keynote, Pages, numbers and Mail). The problem I have though, is Apple Contacts and Outlook 2011 have trouble communicating data fields or something, as I am always seeming to lose data in one app or the other. And for me, that's a major problem given that I do business development for our company.
Any ideas on a better solution that does not include getting rid of MS Office or Apple contacts (needed especially for my iPhone)?
I'm afraid not. Contacts should sync with Exchange servers, same as Outlook. But if it's not working for you, I don't have any suggestions or alternatives, sorry.
Sigh..... the AppleScript may work again for Gmail. But the mails physically still are in the All Mails folder. And getting mail data via AppleScript is just too slow.
Additionally, my spam filter went amok after updating to 10.9.2 and all my mails ended up in the spam folder. This was fixed after resetting the spam info.
Still not possible to set a default font for outgoing messages
My problem relates to Folders/Labels.
I would like my sent mail to go into the folder Sent/Gmail IMAP instead of into a sub folder "Sent Mail" contained within another folder called [Google Mail}. The same thing happens to Deleted Mail.
The three folders All Mail, Deleted Mail, and Sent Mail are all in this (White) [Google Mail] folder. They don't appear that way in Gmail Settings. These sub folders can be moved out but after a while they pop right back in again. Deleting the Labels doesn't work either they just get recreated. I'm lost!
Can I attach an explanatory screen shot to these comments?
I'm not sure how you got into that state, but if it happened to me, I'd delete my Gmail account from Mail and re-add it, after ensuring that all the relevant labels (All Mail, Deleted Mail, Sent Mail) are enabled for IMAP on the Gmail Web site. When you add the account again, Mail should put everything in its proper place.
Do you know what I should do with the existing Labels or should I delete them also?
The labels will disappear when you delete the account, unless they're stored On My Mac (in which case, make sure they're empty and then delete them).
I did as suggested - deleted my Gmail account from Mail and re-added it. It has largely fixed the problem but I still have an empty undeletable folder called [Google Mail] under Gmail which is not in my Labels list in Gmail Settings. The folder has a disclosure triangle.
An online search indicates that a few (not many) users have experienced this. I may have to live with it. Strange!
Have they fixed the search feature in Mail so that older, searched emails show content in the message window?
Or better yet does your new Take Control explain how to fix this?
Sorry, I'm not sure I follow you. I wasn't aware of any problems with search results, but perhaps I just don't understand the problem you were experiencing. Can you describe it in more detail?
If ,for example, I put in the name of someone in the Mail search box I have been getting emails from for several years and select "From", the whole group of emails do appear but the older emails don't show any content in the message window (the message looks blank) but if I then open Spotlight and search the name and date there, then the email will show up in the Spotlight search and will open properly with the message content showing.
Hmm. Are you talking about the preview lines in the message list, underneath the subject line? Sometimes it can take several seconds for those to fill in, if the found set is large. It may not be instantaneous, but in my experience, it does happen shortly.
A small thing, but welcome: I used to have a lot of trouble grabbing an email in order to drag it into a mailbox folder. I would have to try three or four times sometimes before it would come. With Mavericks installed, it's easy to click, grab, and drag the email title in the "From" column and drag it to whatever mailbox I want.
My four main gripes still not fixed.
1.) No option to always view attachments (while editing) as icon rather than as preview. I always need to manually right-click each and every preview to get it to display as icon.
2.) Send again does not work when an email is selected. The email actually needs to be opened for the command to work. Even if this were intended behavior, why is the menu item not grayed out then when it's not available?
3.) My Archive contains two identical "On my Mac" folders. Nothing else. Why the duplicate? I'm afraid to start deleting anything here because that folder contains each and every email I've ever received (I use POP and archive locally).
4.) I have a folder that contains several other folders with locally stored emails. When I slick on the folder I don't see any email. I have to click on one of the enclosed folders to see its email content. What purpose does showing a blank window instead of an aggregated list serve?
You can get the attachment behavior you prefer with the Attachment Tamer plugin:
http://lokiware.info/Attachment-Tamer
Ok. On the bright side, although the latest Apple-Mail in 10.9.2 may not be perfect, at least it is usable !! (at least for me). In 10.9.1, I could not even have Apple-Mail open, because it would steal lots of CPU cycles, for no good reason.
Mail 7.2 (in 10.9.2) still has not cured some issues with attachments with my three Macs (Mac Pro, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air):
1. In classic layout, _sent_ attachments are never indicated in the paperclip column, nor in the column for the number of attachments. I understand this does not affect every user, but it affects all my Macs. I can "cure" this with a rule, but it's very annoying to have to remember to apply the rule every single time I send attachments.
2. I have set the preferences for the downloads folder to be my desktop (as it's always been). To save an attachment, I now have to hover around (trying to find the save button), then answer questions about where I'd like the attachment(s) saved. This seems to be nonsense. There's no point in having preferences, if questions are asked every time.
3. If I merely ask for the attachment(s) to be placed on my desktop, it sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't. Quite often, I can only find the attachments buried deep inside ~/Library/Mail/V2/etc. The "cure" is to use the dropdown menu File/ Save attachments/ then answer the questions - at least that does place the attachment(s) on the desktop.
I might add that these issues have only appeared in recent versions of Mail. The issues never existed before - Mail just worked for me before!
I should have added that I submitted a big report about item 1 (not showing attachments) in April 2012, relating to Mail 5.2
I suspect that, as the issue does not affect every Mac, it has been ignored in subsequent versions and may never be corrected.
Did you get any answer about your point #2? I got Maverick today and this is one of the items that are really annoying me!
Sorry, for the delay, but nobody replied about any of my points, so I temporarily stopped checking for replies. As you will now realise, no, I didn't receive any response to item 2.
Maybe none of the problems annoys anyone except me - and now you.
No prob for the delay! See? I'm late on answering too! Can't believe that we are the only two persons annoyed by this! Anyways... Let's hope Apple does an update and fix this. I'll write to them on their feedback page (in case nobody did) ;-) !
I’m not sure if this is a bug or the result of my restore methods. My boot drive needed to be reformatted three times over four days before I gave up and returned it for a replacement. I have Time Machine and Retrospect Express backups, but I’d turned off the automatic Retrospect backups until I had a stable boot drive. During that period restoring from Time Machine gave me an unstable environment, so I switched to a month-old clone. I imported the Time Machine mailboxes and dragged the missing email to the appropriate mailboxes on my clone. When I migrated to the replacement drive I found that a few messages from my Sent mailbox have the correct date and timestamp, but the subject and content is from another email. A message to Joe about subject A from a few weeks ago would appear where an email to Mary about subject B should be. I’m guessing that Mail started using message numbers on my temporary boot drive that it had already used on the drive that I returned, and now it’s confused. I just ordered Take Control of Apple Mail and tried rebuilding the mailboxes and deleting the envelope indexes, but that didn’t help.
Wow, that is a weird one, and I've never heard of that happening before. You might try a Time Machine restore of just the affected messages from *within* Mail. Worth a shot, anyway.
Joe, thanks for all your efforts with Mail. I read the book before upgrading 10.8.5 to 10.9.2, as a result changed some of my Gmail settings. Very helpful. Mail is working ok on 2 Macs, 3 iPhones and an iPad. Initially I had some issues with Mail taking a long time to sync and that resulted in poor searches. After a day searches improved. One odd thing I found under Gmail. If you move mail to a local mail box, either drag and drop or with the menus it is not moved out of the Archive (All Mail) folder. Mail moves a copy. However, if you do the move with Mail Act-On then the mail is moved out of the All Mail folder which I understand is the correct IMAP behavior. This can cause some confusion as you have mail in two places for some mail if you are moving some with Mail and some with Mail Act-On. I'm leaving All Mail showing and just ignoring it although I wish Mail itself would move the mail out of the All Mail folder when it was moved to a local mail box.
Since downloading 10.9.2 Mail has stopped downloading on my iMac. I have done the usual, rechecking settings, rebooting etc. No new mail since Feb 27. Very irritating.
So, Mavericks breaks email when it's connected to Gmail. Apple fixes it 2 months later. Now 10.9.2 breaks it again. I cannot move messages from the inbox to any folders. Does that mean I have to wait another 2 months for Apple to fix it again?
WHAT IS SO BLOODY HARD ABOUT HAVING AN EMAIL THAT WORKS!!!!
For me, 10.9.2 still has two problems with Google accounts, one which started with Mavericks, and the other has been there at least since Lion.
1) Emails that I have marked Read and moved out of the Inbox into a Smart Mailbox show up in the Inbox as Unread again at a later time.
2) Unable to use SMTP on some but not all of my Google accounts. Don't know the exact issue but Connection Doctor gives me a red light. Removing and re-adding them may fix the problem for a day or so, but then the problem returns.
Remember, smart mailboxes aren't real mailboxes—they're just saved searches. So you can't move anything "into" or "out of" a smart mailbox (except to the Trash). It's a search, so it always shows matching messages, regardless of their actual location.
The problem I have with Mail is that it keeps checking for new mail ALL THE TIME ... even when in 'sleep' mode. I have selected "check for new messages" to manual, but it just ignores this and continues to check automatically. Is there some way to stop this happening? I'm using gmail and hotmail imap acccounts.
On the Energy Saver pane of System Preferences, do you have "Enable Power Nap" selected (on the Battery and/or Power Adapter tabs)? If so, try unchecking it.
Yes, I read that somewhere too. It is UNCHECKED. I've looked at console and activity monitor and they both show periodic activity during sleep mode. This morning the computer was "hot" despite being asleep. There had been a LOT of activity and hour before I woke it up.
This inability to 'manually check messages' is driving me nuts also. I recently got a new Mac with OS 10.9.5 and this still seems unresolved. Unwanted piles of new email are in my face when I 'unsleep' my computer in the morning, unwanted computer activity occurs when it's supposed to be sleeping. What the hell? Any news on a way to fix this?
This new update of Maverick, 10.9.2 has totally messed up my email. I have three accounts. Mine, my wives and an organization. The last two are finally working ok, but mine is still messed up. It doesn't show if I have any email when I do. To access my Mail account, I have to right click my account, then the Account info window pops up and runs through all accounts then if I have mail it shows on my account on my email with a number. I've been dealing with email problems for a month now and even put it into the Geek Squad at Best Buy. They worked on it a week and could do nothing. And that's what they got paid too. I've had my IMac for almost 4 years and never had any problems. APPLE, get off your ass and fix these mail problems!
If you haven't already done so, be sure to send your comments directly to Apple (in Mail, choose Mail > Provide Mail Feedback). Apple doesn't read comments on TidBITS articles :-).
You might also consider going to an Apple Store. The folks there will be much more likely to know how to solve problems like this than Geek Squad employees.
Thank you for your good article about how gmail and the mail app work or don't work together. It seems like it is still difficult to use applescript to move gmail messages. I developed two workarounds, combining mail rules and applescript that made it work again. I describe it in
http://asynkronix.se/archiving-and-moving-gmail-with-applescript-on-mavericks/
I use Gmail and have an IMAP folder created to get all the mail for a mailing list and my Gmail rule works fine. On Yosemite, Apple Mail shows the folder correctly and actually, nearly everything works correctly. The only problem is that I get a "ding" for each new mail messages to that folder. It doesn't increment the unread "red number" on the dashboard, which is good. But the ding is driving me crazy because messages come in there every few minutes and I think that it is "real" mail to me - not just mailing list noise. Any suggestions? Happy to buy your book if it is in there!
The way I would handle that personally is to set up a filter on the Gmail server to file those messages, rather than use a Mail rule. Then there shouldn't be any dings.
You could also turn off the dings altogether, of course!
I do use Gmail filter to do that. Sorry, I called it a Gmail "rule". But I still get the "ding"! It doesn't seem correct to play the new mail sound even when Mail doesn't increment the red number on the dock.
I did think about disabling the "ding" altogether, but it is useful for "real" mail.
Oh well, thanks for trying Joe.
Huh! Well, that surprises me, but I'm afraid Mail just doesn't offer granular control over notifications.
I haven't used alerts for Mail in many years, because I *always* have new messages, so there's no point :-).