Three things I hate about Apple Mail

I use Apple Mail instead of competing products like Microsoft Entourage or Google Gmail. I don’t use Entourage because I try not to use Microsoft products if I can help it, not just as conscientious objection but also because they are bloated. I refuse to use Gmail because I try not to use Google products if I can help it, not only to avoid sharing data with Google but also because I need access to my mail offline. As far as modern GUI apps go, Apple Mail is relatively lithe and sports some nice features, such as multiple account inbox aggregation and message coloring.

But there are three things that drive me nuts about Apple Mail.

Why can’t Mail count? The total and unread message count are almost always off in the menubar display and in the dock icon. Furthermore, the count changes to various different types of incorrect. Sometimes it is accurate, but not frequently. Here’s a nice example, whereby I appear to have more unread messages than total messages.

This may seem like a minor thing, but I use the message count in my inbox across accounts as a simple way of benchmarking my email todos.

I travel a lot and often use the time on planes to write email responses, which can sit in my outbox until I connect after landing. But even though I can take my accounts offline in Apple Mail, and even though the OS knows full well that I have no internet connection, still I get this annoying SMTP error pop-up every time I send a message while offline.

I can grasp why it might be helpful to see the message once, since a user might not have realized that a WiFi connection dropped or a network cable unplugged accidentally. Even once per SMTP account, in case some are unreachable. But every time? Every single time?

Because I often respond to emails on airplanes, I also often read messages for the first time in that context. While Mail always downloads my messages, it sometimes (not always) fails to download message attachments. Often I see the following disappointment.

Once more, it’s hard to tell when this takes place. It’s not just for very large files, and sometimes two of three attachments, say, on a single message will have downloaded while the other will not have. As much as I hate getting attachments with content that could have been included inline (more on that in another post), when I do receive them, why not download the whole message?

Does anyone know any way to remedy these defects?