User Comments on Apple Mail in Lion

User comments on Apple Mail.

Kit L

I’ve had better luck than Kit, but I agree that Apple Mail in Lion has more than a few glitches, especially with Mobile Me.

Sitting in a cleverly humidified Starbucks on a 110 degree day in Scottsdale AZ, I have been revisiting your excellent MacPerformanceGuide, and meditating on user interfaces.

Mail as an app has been performing intermittently and very poorly under Lion for over a week—hence I write to you via the much less user-friendly webmail interface. Much has been posted elsewhere on how Mail simply cannot find its own SMTP server for mobile me accounts, and I have had one since the service began. As Mail is my main business tool when on the road, I find this simply not believable—yet it is the case, nonetheless.

And webmail has some amazing not-seen-for-years issues of its own: see how I had to put in a CR in the line above? If the text is big enough to read outside on a 15" MBP (latest quad-core i7), then two things: text will not wrap (!) and the screen will not follow the text input, so your new text goes off the screen once some arbitrary line length has been reached! Incredible, no?

And as I use Text Edit multiple times a day (I manage a big web site as well as write), I found I had to buy UltraEdit to get the same functionality as I was getting in Text Edit running under Snow Leopard. Your suggested workaround is OK for some things, but I used TE to strip out embedded formatting etc., as a simple one-step then Save As, without doing anything to the original... those days are gone, it seems.

Versions may be helpful, but like yourself, I like to control aspects of daily operations myself—to release Lion without the option to turn Versions off is a major step backwards, in my view.

And, because I use Mail hourly, reverting to SL is not an option... (because of the updating that you noted in your original article)

And to make matters worse, Mail is totally unreliable to boot