This holiday weekend I tasked myself with setting up new email service on three Macs.
One was on El Capitan, one on Mavericks, and one on (dare I admit it) Tiger.
Mail.app provides a remarkably smooth voyage for setting up the services it is aware of such as iCloud and GMail.However I needed to set up about ten accounts on each machine, none of them with one of the major services. This took me off the edge of the map to "Other Email...." and it is here that the seas get stormy.
I was prepared with a list of all of my email servers, ports, usernames, and passwords.
Even so, I had to enter the same parameters many times, and often had to wipe out accounts and start over.
I found myself running Connection Doctor so many times that my hosting company locked out my IP address, thinking it was an attempt at cracking or a denial of service attack.
Here's what I would like to see in mail.app to ease the setup of custom accounts:
1. Please remember passwords the first time, and give me an option to see passwords in plain text.
2. Show both incoming and outgoing settings together - do away with the SMTP server list
3. Add a Save button with immediate feedback so I know the values I've entered have truly been retained.
4. Add the option to duplicate an existing account as a quick starting point for adding a new one with mostly the same settings.
5. Give me the option to test each connection individually.
OS-X's built in applications are typically terse. An added measure of verbosity and visibility might not look as irreproachably cool, but would facilitate what really should be a straightforward task.
![mailAppUI.png]( "mailAppUI.png")
One was on El Capitan, one on Mavericks, and one on (dare I admit it) Tiger.
Mail.app provides a remarkably smooth voyage for setting up the services it is aware of such as iCloud and GMail.However I needed to set up about ten accounts on each machine, none of them with one of the major services. This took me off the edge of the map to "Other Email...." and it is here that the seas get stormy.
I was prepared with a list of all of my email servers, ports, usernames, and passwords.
Even so, I had to enter the same parameters many times, and often had to wipe out accounts and start over.
I found myself running Connection Doctor so many times that my hosting company locked out my IP address, thinking it was an attempt at cracking or a denial of service attack.
Here's what I would like to see in mail.app to ease the setup of custom accounts:
1. Please remember passwords the first time, and give me an option to see passwords in plain text.
2. Show both incoming and outgoing settings together - do away with the SMTP server list
3. Add a Save button with immediate feedback so I know the values I've entered have truly been retained.
4. Add the option to duplicate an existing account as a quick starting point for adding a new one with mostly the same settings.
5. Give me the option to test each connection individually.
OS-X's built in applications are typically terse. An added measure of verbosity and visibility might not look as irreproachably cool, but would facilitate what really should be a straightforward task.