Emails are fast. But they should also be pretty to look at and come with well-packed attachments. Some of these wishes are possible with Apple’s latest email software Mail, which is part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is to have – others not.
An e-mail is not a legally binding statement. The risk of forgery or late delivery is too high. Besides, it’s not easy to sign an email in a forgery-proof way. As long as these problems are not solved, we recommend for really important things, the good old communication on paper. Often desired, but still not feasible in email is, for example, the read receipt. This is an e-mail extension from Microsoft, which is not available in the e-mail protocol languages (IMAP, POP3 and SMTP). Technically, the read receipt is a response that the recipient’s software sends as soon as the recipient opens the email. A double-edged issue: On the one hand, the sender knows that his message has been opened; on the other hand, not all recipients may want to be shown their cards in this way. Apple’s Mail software does not support this feature, so you can’t request a read receipt when sending, and conversely, Mail does not respond to such confirmation requests.
Parade discipline nice appearance
Templates for e-mails in Apple’s Mail software are based on an HTML design and some freely selectable parameters (See: More beautiful e-mails with Apple Mail ). You can get the overview of all templates when writing a new e-mail by clicking the button of the same name in the upper right corner of the window. It opens an additional bar below the “Subject” line, where you can see the categories of templates on the left and a small sample image for each template on the right. If you are allowed to insert images into such a template, you can select them either via iPhoto (for this purpose use the button “Photo overview” or the command “Window> Photo overview”) or drag them directly from the Finder into the email. Then we double-click on the image to set the cropping and magnification. It is not possible to change the rotation or the overlapping of the images.
Notes and tasks with IMAP
For notes and tasks Apple uses a little trick: When you create a note or task, Mail creates a new message in the user’s mailbox and marks it as a note with a special entry in the message preamble (for professionals: “X-Uniform-Type-Identifier: com.apple.mail-note”). But you need an e-mail server that understands IMAP commands. This works among others with Apple’s paid service .Mac, but also with free email services like Web.en or Gmail.
If you want to change your IMAP mailbox (for example .Mac) with the browser, sees that a note is really just an email like any other: In the browser, the note is displayed as an email, and Mail automatically transfers the first line of the note text to the subject line. An effect you can also see when you open a note and click on the “Send” button above the text.
In the preferences you define in which IMAP mailbox these notes are stored. By default, the notes are set to land in the last used mailbox, but you can select a specific IMAP mailbox via a drop-down menu.
In our example, we created a new note (“control-dial-N”) and entered the text. We then converted the last line of text by clicking on the “Task” button. However, Mail does not automatically recognize the entered date. Therefore, if you have a task that needs to be finished by a certain date, you should click on the red arrow next to the task and activate the deadline in the options and enter the correct date.
A task is entered in Apple’s calendar software iCal at the same time. It is visible there in the task list (“Command-Choose-T”).
RSS messages as e-mail
Many internet sites (among others also Macwelt.de) publish headline and some descriptive words to all new news in a RSS news stream (English: “RSS feed” = “really simple syndication”). You can see this RSS data in the Safari browser, for example, if the blue logo “RSS” is displayed next to the address of the website and you click on this logo with the mouse. Mail is set by Apple to show a separate entry for RSS data on the left sidebar and – if an Internet connection is available – the number of unread messages in RSS format. A click on the entry then shows the individual headers in the main window; the additional description can be seen when selecting a header. Alternatively, in the settings for an RSS stream (expand the “RSS” entry, select RSS stream and click on the cogwheel icon at the very bottom of the Mail window), you can also display the messages in the Inbox. However, we do not recommend this setting, as it can increase the number of messages in the inbox enormously.
TIP Behind the scenes Mail and Safari work with the same utility “PubSubAgent” when handling RSS data. If you limit the firewall of Mac-OS X to certain programs and services (System Preferences> Security> firewall), therefore must allow this program to access the Internet. Otherwise RSS messages are not displayed.
When there is a problem with mail
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Sending an email usually takes seconds: Type the text, enter the subject and recipient’s address, and send. If all servers involved are working properly, the e-mail should reach the recipient one or two minutes later (sometimes even faster). However, since email is a relatively old system on the Internet, it can occasionally take a little longer or fail altogether. Annoyingly, the error messages are rarely meaningful in case of an error. On top of that, there’s a setting that Apple has left unchanged for years, despite the fact that it’s a recurring source of annoyance – the “time out”. This is the time when Mail no longer waits for a reply from the e-mail server, but aborts the process. This means that Mail waits, for example, only 60 seconds before it cancels the attempt to download mail from the server. If the connection aborts without reading any mail, Mail suspects that an incorrect password was entered for the inbox server and displays a query to that effect. In 9 out of 10 cases the password is completely correct – Mail has simply drawn a wrong conclusion. If the software waited longer, the mail server would have more time to respond. Such a disconnection happens more often than you think. If the inbox server is heavily loaded or the mailbox contains a lot of new messages, there is a high probability that after logging in with username and password a considerable amount of time will pass before the server responds. Because at the beginning of the communication between email software on the Mac and the email server, the server provides the information how many unread messages are in the mailbox and (mostly) additionally the file size of these messages. But this means that the server has to detect every unread message in the mailbox and calculate the message length. With busy servers this can take several minutes.
TIP If a mailbox cannot be opened after a longer absence and Mail claims several times after a long waiting time that the password is invalid, the only way out is to read the e-mails with another software or – if the e-mail provider – offers this option, to read the e-mails via an Internet page and to sort out the superfluous ones. It is not possible in Mail to set the time period until the server connection is terminated.
Valuable help about the basic state of the mail servers is provided by Mail via the Connection Wizard ( Window> Check connection”). It connects to the incoming mail server and the outgoing mail server for each e-mail address entered in Mail in the preferences. In addition, the top line of the window shows whether the Internet connection is working properly. If all entries in this window start with a green dot, receiving and sending should actually work.
When the mailbox overflows
Sometimes, however, things go wrong in a completely different place: If friends send e-mails, but Mail does not display any new e-mails, there are really only two possible reasons: Either the mailbox is overfilled or the e-mail has been classified as junk mail on the server or in Mail and removed from the inbox. Mailbox overflow is particularly tricky: with most email providers you don’t get a warning. Instead, from a certain point in time, there are no new e-mails in the inbox. Mail is actually set at the factory so that this case cannot occur – in Mail’s settings it is defined that the software deletes all mails on the inbox server that are older than one month (“Mail> Settings> Accounts> [Mail account]> Advanced> Option: Delete copy from server after receiving mail”).
TIP If the inbox is really overflowing, start Mail, open the settings, click on the corresponding mailbox under “Accounts” and then switch to the “Advanced” section on the right. There is a button “Delete now”, which deletes all already read e-mails from the server. This command is fatal only if you read the e-mails with two different computers and both are not on the same level: If you delete the e-mails from the server with this method, some of the messages may be missing on the second computer.
Emails that have been filtered out by mistake
More difficult to find are e-mails that are filtered out by the provider or in Mail, because the checking software considers them to be unwanted advertisements. Therefore, the only tip is to familiarize yourself with the checking mechanism. Some providers (for example Web.de or GMX) move such advertisements to special folders in the mailbox; others like Apple’s service .Mac mark the ads only. For all services that automatically move emails, we recommend a daily look into the folders that contain the promotional emails – usually you should be able to tell from the headline or the sender whether the email contains useful information or just advertisements.
Conclusion
emails are quickly written and transmitted. Reading and responding meaningfully, on the other hand, often takes much more time. Here’s why nice-looking emails with Apple’s new templates are a help, but fail if the written message remains muddled. As the saying goes: “It’s the content that counts.”