Mac OS X 10.5.x Special Report: Mail.app issues

We've received a few reports of various issues connected with the Mail application in Leopard.

One reader states that automatic filtering of Junk into the Junk mailbox is not working:

Since I installed Leopard, I can't get junk mail filtering to work. I've gone into preferences and enabled filtering, asking only that it puts the junk mail in the junk mailbox. If they are in my address book then they aren't junk. I've been teaching it what is junk mail for a few weeks now and nothing gets put in the junk mailbox unless i label it myself.

On the other hand, we have a report of exactly the opposite: everything goes into the Junk mailbox:

Ever since installing Leopard on my MacBook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo, Mail has treated all my email as spam. It makes no difference how I set it up, the junk filter can be disabled, enabled but told to leave spam in my inbox, every conceivable variation. The result remains the same, all email is sent to the spam mailbox.

These reports are difficult to analyze, because Mail's settings are themselves so confusing. One would need to know much more about the individual setup: What kind of account is this, have you made clear to Mail which mailbox is to perform what role, and so forth.

Another report claims that Safari's ability to turn a Web page into an HTML email message in Mail is not working correctly:

since the leopard upgrade one of the most useful functions of safari seems to be buggy, this is the 'mail contents of this page' function. previously under tiger, the html came across flawlessly in mail. now, I am getting lots of little lego-looking 'question mark' boxes where the image files should be.

But this feature is working just fine on my machine. Again, one would like to know more about the user's individual settings; perhaps if display of remote images is turned off in the preferences, one would get this result.

Here's a more technical issue: certain attachment filenames can give Mail problems:

A problem that began with Leopard's version of Mail.app and does not exist in any version of Tiger causes mail to hang whenever an e-mail that contains an attachment (such as a word document or image) with a filename encoded in Windows Hebrew-1255 is opened. 10.5.1 does not fix this bug. Unicode Hebrew characters seem unaffected, but some Windows software creates filenames in Hebrew encoded in 1255. Current workaround is to hide the preview pane, never doubleclick a message received with any attachments and to use quickview to view these attachments by hitting applekey y. Otherwise, just viewing the message causes mail.app to hang, requiring a force quit.

And one reader reports an inability to make Rules operate on certain messages:

It seems impossible to make rules, even simple ones based on To: or From: in Mail if the message received is in html format. These same rules work flawlessly in the case of plain text messages. In particular I've found it impossible to make content-based rules for messages whose content type is text/html; charset=Windows-1252.

Also worth noting: In Leopard's Mail program, there's a new formatting feature: Format > Indentation. A MacFixIt reader, Tom, has pointed out that this feature has a bug.

To see the bug, do this:

1. Make a new email message.

2. Type a word or two of text; the word "text" will do.

3. Without moving the insertion point, choose Format > Indentation > Increase. The text you typed (e.g. teh word "text") will move over to the right a little; this is the indent you asked.

4. Send the message.

5. Now look in the Sent folder at the message you just sent. The indentation is gone! And when your recipient gets the message, there won't be any indentation either.

Here's what's going on. Indentation is a "rich text" formatting feature. It is implemented, therefore, by treating your email message as HTML, just as done if you use other "rich text" features like fonts, bold style, and so on. The problem is that if indentation is the only "rich text" feature your message uses, Mail sends the message as plain text, not as HTML. The indentation is thus lost.

The bug is a small one, and there's an easy workaround: use some other "rich text" feature in addition to indentation. Nevertheless, it's a bug. Perhaps this will be among the many things that will be fixed by the 10.5.1 update which we're hoping will be released incredibly soon now.

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