[d00d]

dreyfus, on 21 January 2013 - 11:42 AM, said:

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I think that nicely distills the problem. In order for Mail to do what you want, you need two add-ons plus some AppleScripts. Wouldn't it be better if the capabilities of these things was part of Mail to begin with?

Really depends on the user requirements. What I see with novice users is that the standard menus of Mail.app are already scaring them. I assume 90%+ of the people in my company do not know what mail headers are, what encoding is, or why IMAP accounts work different from POP, what the difference between a signature and signing a message is, why attachments work differently on Windows etc. Adding a lot of functions which only a fraction of the users will ever need comes at a cost. If I imagine the task of explaining to my mother (89 and using Mail.app without problems) what all the different options in the MailTags window are for (which I would have to do, if they were there), I prefer this to be an add-on myself. Especially since some of these third-party add-ons offer integration options (e.g. with DropBox or OmniFocus) that Apple would never offer (their support of Twitter or Facebook as sharing options does zip for me).

But, of course, this is a matter of opinion. I just think it is absolutely workable.

I think you've captured it. To pile on a little more, adding more features that perhaps 1% of users will use incurs UI cruft, additional code that could cause bugs in other more commonly used pieces, and costs development time that could be invested in a feature (for anything else) that far more users will take advantage of. This is all ignoring that if Apple were to listen to all the various 1%'s to satisfy their little bugaboos (that can be solved with third party tools or scripts) would constitute design by committee, which is pretty sure to turn out a monstrosity.

[Chris Breen]

d00d, on 23 January 2013 - 05:19 AM, said:

I think you've captured it. To pile on a little more, adding more features that perhaps 1% of users will use incurs UI cruft, additional code that could cause bugs in other more commonly used pieces, and costs development time that could be invested in a feature (for anything else) that far more users will take advantage of. This is all ignoring that if Apple were to listen to all the various 1%'s to satisfy their little bugaboos (that can be solved with third party tools or scripts) would constitute design by committee, which is pretty sure to turn out a monstrosity.

First, Apple knows a little something about design. I think we can trust its designers to implement features without destroying an application's interface.

Secondly, existing options are hardly meant for the greater good of all. Mail's ability to filter by any message header, for example. How many people can find the feature, much less use it? Yet there it is. This indicates to me that "hardly anyone uses it" is not the bar Apple measures by.

Thirdly, again, back to the point of "just use an add-on or AppleScript" underscores the point. *Natively* email clients are dumber than before and require this kind of enhancement. I regret that.

[Tord]

I have been using mail.com for quite a while, and on the whole, pretty impressed. Stable, and easy to set up, and you can construct as complex filters as you want. The user interface is eons better than Gmail, and it works as well if you're using a iPhone as a PC, iMac, or whatever!

[d00d]

Chris Breen, on 23 January 2013 - 09:00 AM, said:

First, Apple knows a little something about design. I think we can trust its designers to implement features without destroying an application's interface.

Generally by making decisions about things being left out. One of the most common criticisms of Apple software is the lack of options/buttons/UI elements. There isn't much arguing against the "Apple knows better than you how to do this without trade offs" view however, so agree to disagree.

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Secondly, existing options are hardly meant for the greater good of all. Mail's ability to filter by any message header, for example. How many people can find the feature, much less use it? Yet there it is. This indicates to me that "hardly anyone uses it" is not the bar Apple measures by.

In that case they already paid the UI cruft cost and their filtering engine was probably already designed for the general case and no specific fields.

Quote

Thirdly, again, back to the point of "just use an add-on or AppleScript" underscores the point. *Natively* email clients are dumber than before and require this kind of enhancement. I regret that.

And yet the overwhelming majority of users are actually far happier with how their email clients work, and new users are less intimidated. I don't see much fault with that.

[PSMacintosh]

Nothing surpasses Entourage (from MS Office 2008). It handles all my daily workflow (except for bookkeeping, which requires Quicken).
Every mail program since has been a downgrade in features and abilities.

Nowadays, I work in Entourage on my MBP all day. Then I pass my Entourage Contacts and Calendar through to my iPhone.
(Haven't passed my Notes through yet. So, in the last year, I create all my new notes in the Contacts > Comment section, instead of in a new Note.)
I've setup Entourage Prefs to pass Contacts and Calendar through to iCal. Then have iCal pass the data through to the iPhone. I NEVER use iCal, just have it act as a pass-through pipe.
I do the SYNC manually (using iTunes over USB wire to my iPhone) every couple of days.
I've had a bit of problem at times with DUPLICATE CALENDAR EVENTS showing up back in the Entourage Calender, but have found how to delete them. (It's happened twice and I'm not sure what causes it.)