PSA: Apple Mail Incorrectly Parses Addresses in Signatures as Missing Recipients

[sdf]

Does it work if you follow the standard of delineating your signature with "-- " (two - and a space)?

 

[okkibs]

I absolutely do not understand why half the replies here are about why someone would have their email in their signature block.

These "you are holding it wrong" replies always show up. There is always a reason why a problem isn't actually one because you should not actually be doing this. Instead, here's a recommendation of how you should go about it instead. This wouldn't work for you? The way you did it always worked until a bug broke it? Doesn't matter: You are doing it wrong and here's five reasons why my way of doing it is superior.

If everyone on this thread reports this

I see no indication that Apple even reads these bug reports from the public. Let's bring this up again once Apple decides to pay us for testing. Because testing for bugs is a paid job, one that Apple has neglected over many years now, and in the actual world we live in I'll just stop using faulty products instead of helping out multi-billion dollar companies in my free time. To put it differently, if I file a bug report for every issue I encounter with all sorts of electronics devices and software, I'll be busy for a long while.

 

[mxrider88]

That is quite embarrassing…seems no one tested the feature properly.

If I see all the ridiculous bugs in the whole ecosystem I wonder is they use macs and iPhones at all in Cupertino.

There are bugs that are just too obvious to be missed if you use the phone on a daily basis.

Just the last ridiculous one last night I couldn’t turn on the light in the kitchen with the HomePod: hey siry turn on the kitchen light. Answer: for how long.
Tried about 10 times.

 

[vddobrev]

This is a useless feature, it looks like some kid had too much time on corporate pay clock and came up with this. Who puts email addresses in the body of the email? Normal people address each other in emails by name, and if you happen to quote a name in the email body, then it would be a good feature to check that name against your address book... but again that would be a bit too intrusive...

 

[Wanted797]

Right click on the "From" field and voila—click to write new email.

Or just click the hyperlink in one click

 

[Alwis]

This is a useless feature, it looks like some kid had too much time on corporate pay clock and came up with this. Who puts email addresses in the body of the email? Normal people address each other in emails by name, and if you happen to quote a name in the email body, then it would be a good feature to check that name against your address book... but again that would be a bit too intrusive...

Have you ever written mails to real people, somethink like: “Here ist the address of the shop we talk about“

And people do put their contact information in the footer of a mail, in some cases some informations are even required by law. And nobody writes their phone number and omits the mail address, just because it may also be in the from field of the mail headers.

 

[vddobrev]

Have you ever written mails to real people, somethink like: “Here ist the address of the shop we talk about“

And people do put their contact information in the footer of a mail, in some cases some informations are even required by law. And nobody writes their phone number and omits the mail address, just because it may also be in the from field of the mail headers.

Your examples are mute. When you wrote that shop email address, did you also want to copy them? No, but this feature will prompt you that you forgot.

The signature email has already been discussed.

 

[1885507]

Personally I don't get why people put their email address in their email footers. It's in the mail header, if I need / want it that's where I'll find it.

The practice is a relic of the late 90s/early 2000s, back when "the e-mail" was still sort of new and slowly replacing snail mail and fax machines.

Instead of attaching a reasonable, up-to-date vCard like a civilized person, the petite bourgeoisie instead continue to type-everything-out-in-full, making a ginormous, unnecessary e-mail footers [that nobody reads or cares about] instead.

 

[m_emelchenkov]

vCard is hardly may be called a popular technology, it's too non-visual. As for e-mail footers—i.e. Gmail just hides email signature at all, so nobody will read the signature until they press special link at the bottom of the message. The overall situation is that email is not upgraded since 80's. X.25 or UUCP or Fido not too much differs from 21st century email. Yes, some technologies, like IMAP v4, TLS and DKIM makes mail survived, but it's nowhere compared to, i.e., HTML3 -> HTML5 WWW revolution. That's why we are still talking about attaching vCards or mentioning emails in mail signatures. There were some efforts to make mail more fun, but they did not get enough success. Also, some current tendencies (which is a topic for a full-fledged article) make email even worser than in "good old days". Email has not died for only one simple reason: it is still more convenient for work than chats and messengers.

Despite of that, this does not justify Apple in any way, with only one caveat that for stable operating system you still need to wait for several minor releases, so not to be a beta-tester of most obvious bugs which will always be in the first days or weeks after an initial release.

 

[_Spinn_]

How did this get past testing and the betas?

 

[CoMoMacUser]

Who puts email addresses in the body of the email?

Pretty much every client I work with. This bug, minor as it might be, is still one more example of how Mail is not a business-grade product.

 

[dork]

Ventura’s version of Mail has been really wonky for me. It hasn’t been syncing well and often brings back deleted messages. I can’t understand how they can test the OS for so long and yet something this obvious slips through.

Same. Bad bad syncing with Gmail that I never had problems with before; the issue raised in the article; refusal/failure to send messages. It's a mess.

 

[dork]

It's difficult to believe that zero people at Apple put their emails in their signature.

So then the obvious question is, why wasn't this easily caught earlier?

It's a good question - and it's not even the worst problem with the new Mail.app!

 

[svish]

Hopefully Apple can address this soon. Probably in the next update.

 

[dork]

I don't even understand the point of this feature. It's really useful when an email client notices you might not have included an attachment you refer to, but I'm struggling to think of an instance where I would want to include the email address in the message body of someone I'm actually sending that email to. There maybe be niche cases, but I'd suspect that 99.9% of the time that's not something you would be wanting to do.

I'm sure someone will come up with a valid example though.

I can think of one - if there's an email thread with multiple participants and you hit "reply" instead of "reply all." Which happens - sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally. However, I really don't think we need a feature that ENCOURAGES people to use "reply all" more than they already do.

 

[JustARumor]

One other person already mentioned it, but in the screenshot, the user has edited the signature delimiter, the dash-dash-space on a line by itself. I’m not in front of my Mac at the moment, but I’m pretty sure Mail defaults to including it. This is an actual standard that exists specifically so that mail clients can reliably identify what content is the message body versus a signature, and it enables a lot of other features to work much more dependably.

So the question is, does this bug still manifest if the signature isn’t broken? If so, then I’d argue that it’s technically not a bug at all.

That said, even if its not technically a bug, as soon as you realize that Mail allows users enough flexibility in the signature editor to shoot themselves in the foot (especially now that most people don’t know these basics of email), it’s a small leap to realize that this new feature can’t rely on the message being properly formatted and should instead identify the signature through the settings. I’m not at all surprised that engineers missed this in the first several builds, but I am a little surprised it didn’t turn up in broader testing. Or maybe it did but it was deemed lower priority for this release and it’s slated for the next bug-fix release.

 

[1885507]

I'm not seeing this issue so long as the e-mail address is not the last line in the e-mail.

 

[jib2]

And I'm not seeing it even though my email address IS the last line in the email (in my signature).

 

[1885507]

And I'm not seeing it even though my email address IS the last line in the email (in my signature).

Interesting--it may have something to do with how things are formatted. I'm seeing it only in my personal (iCloud) e-mail with the e-mail address the last line yet in my work accounts (both Exchange 365), it never pops up.

 

[sdf]

Instead of attaching a reasonable, up-to-date vCard like a civilized person, the petite bourgeoisie instead continue to type-everything-out-in-full, making a ginormous, unnecessary e-mail footers [that nobody reads or cares about] instead.

Nobody wanted attachments back then.

I still don't, but most people no longer care.

 

[Data Hoover]

Try typing a couple of words preceded by the + symbol then Send. It triggers the issue even without a signature.

For example:

+ hello
+ goodbye

A message with this text will not send on my Macbook Pro or my iPhone.

 

[JustARumor]

Try typing a couple of words preceded by the + symbol then Send. It triggers the issue even without a signature.

This is correct behavior, though. That's a common format that people use to indicate they're adding new people to a message thread, so triggering on text like that in the body makes sense. But it shouldn't be trigger on text in the signature, which is what the bug is.

 

[1885507]

Try typing a couple of words preceded by the + symbol then Send. It triggers the issue even without a signature.

For example:

+ hello
+ goodbye

A message with this text will not send on my Macbook Pro or my iPhone.

You mean it will not send without clicking "Send Anyway"

 

[1885507]

But it shouldn't be trigger on text in the signature, which is what the bug is.

It's plausible although I have no proof to support this that Mail will begin asking for this less and less as the algorithm(s) involved learns from this behavior.

For example, I was seeing the "send anyway" text in nearly every e-mail I sent after upgrading to Ventura but now I'm seeing it less and less.

 

[JustARumor]

It's plausible although I have no proof to support this that Mail will begin asking for this less and less as the algorithm(s) involved learns from this behavior.

Very good point - I'd go further and say it's likely, not just plausible. How they have it handling the .sig be is one thing, but once you're talking about the body content, Apple's almost certainly using some ML to get the job done in an adaptive fashion.