the new Mail.app

[me_94501]

Does anyone else besides me think the new Mail interface utterly wretched? I'm going to have to pull myself together to force myself to use it. Although I'm sure I'll get use to it eventually. But it just that it's *looks* so chunky and doesn't resemble ANY other Mac OS X program. It's an ugly style in my opinion. Several months ago everyone said that "Tiger is not done", and "the interface hasn't been polished yet"; well, it hasn't improved, and Tiger is being released. I don't know what Apple designers are thinking when they let these things out the door.

But inspite of that harsh rubuke, I do have to take my hat off to their team that does user interface structuring. While I don't care for the styles, color, and shapes of the new mail, I do think the layout is excellent. Apple programs have also been very neat and well-thought-out in that way.

You are not the only one who thinks it looks odd. I think it would look better if they used a standard source list, the Panther Mail button style, and dropped that unified toolbar-titlebar thing.

The layout is nice, though.

 

[Mechcozmo]

Whoa, it does look rather odd...

I use Entourage here, but Mail looks kinda cool... just Entourage has all those Palm syncing features.

 

[TigerPRO]

You know, the new Mail screenshots only show the main message viewing window. Has anyone seen any screenshots to varify what the new message windows look like? Maybe they are still good looking.

 

[mj_1903]

I wrote an app for office use to remove the ugly toolbar buttons and change the sounds to something slightly more Mac like. I might release it at some point if there is any interest.

 

[mad jew]

I wrote an app for office use to remove the ugly toolbar buttons and change the sounds to something slightly more Mac like. I might release it at some point if there is any interest.

That sounds pretty cool. Does anyone know of anything that will let you change the GUI of Mail (either Panther or Tiger edition)? I'd love to get the brushed metal look.

 

[mdetry]

Outlook to Mac

I used the Little Machines Software Outlook to Mac.
Although you have to buy it for 10 U$D it worked really well and 4 years of my email is worth much more than 10 U$D.

http://www.littlemachines.com/

Marcos

Here's some links that have a few answers.

http://www.macosx.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-25787.html
http://www.reitter-it-media.de/software/osxhints.html

I ended up using The Bat! to convert all my Outlook Express mailboxes (which has the same file format as Outlook, I think) to the Unix standard mbox format on my Dell Inspiron PIII 600 laptop with a busted keyboard, intermittent hangups during bootup, and Windows ME. Frankly, it sucked. Transferring all my files from my PC to Mac took about an hour; prepping several years' worth of email and transferring the files took over five hours!

Mileage varies, I guess, depending on how fast your PC is and how much email you have to convert first.

 

[weldon]

Does anyone know anything about the new parental controls in Mail.app? Here's the quote from the web page

With Mail Parental Controls, protecting your children from unwelcome email is quick and easy. Create an email safe list for your kids’ Mail accounts and ensure they only exchange email with people they know. Emails from people not on your safe list are automatically routed to your account for approval before they are sent to your kids.

Do you think this is all handled locally with mail redirects by the client? Or is this a .Mac feature? My kids are getting old enough to start using email (oldest is almost 11) but I really don't want them to get any "adult" spam. I have my own domain name for email, and I would give them accounts at this domain rather than at .mac. I'm hoping that this feature will work with any email account.

 

[TigerPRO]

Does anyone know anything about the new parental controls in Mail.app? Here's the quote from the web page


Do you think this is all handled locally with mail redirects by the client? Or is this a .Mac feature? My kids are getting old enough to start using email (oldest is almost 11) but I really don't want them to get any "adult" spam. I have my own domain name for email, and I would give them accounts at this domain rather than at .mac. I'm hoping that this feature will work with any email account.

I think this feature works the same without .Mac. It's a feature of the operating system.

 

[GrumpyJabber]

Exchange Formatting Issue

Has anyone seen an issue with the formatting of messages from an Exchange server? It even acts like it is bringing the message in twice but only displaying it once. Let me explain.

When a message first comes in from the Exchange server, if you can look at it quick enough, the proper formatting is there. Then it acts like it is reloading the message and stripping all the formatting information and displaying in plain text.

My other accounts that are set up don't do that. Am I missing something?