Mail-application

[ie99enda]

Does anybody know how to open or save attachements in this super-bad application. I have mails to my itools accounts and when I open them in mail I cant get the attached files. I try to drag the attachement to finder and then mail tells me "you cant drag files until they are downloaded, do u want to download the file?" off course I answer yes! but then nothing. What the heck is happening, I'll kill my mail soon.

[ristin_uk]

I know exactly how you feel. I HATE Mail. It is sooo useless!
I so need Entourage X, but need it on it's own as don't need/want the full Office v.X suite.

[ShowMe]

I have had this problem intermittently in the past and often in the last week. It may (this is just a guess) be associated with large attachments. Has anybody gotten to the bottom of this problem...better yet, found a solution (besides switching to another mail application ;-)

BTW, mail access with Netscape works fine. The problem's with Mail.app

[edX]

i don't think the problem is with mail.app. i think it is with mac.com smtp mail service. i get attachments , just got a large 2.1 mb one, in my pacbell pop account and they work perfectly. the latest was an original song a friend sent me and all i had to do was click on it and itunes opened and played it for me. (if my friend reads this - good stuff, thanks)

ok, it's still apple's problem, but the real problem doesn't seem to be in mail.app

[simX]

Next time this happens, go to the Activity Viewer in Mail.app. (Command-Option-V, or select it from the "Window" menu)

Using this, you can see if the attachment is actually being downloaded, and this will help diagnose the problem.

I must say, though, that Mail.app has worked perfectly for me. I have had just one annoying intermittent problem, but nothing showstopping (and nothing that a simple restart of Mail.app can't fix). I really love some of it's features, too, like the "Reply" and "Reply to All" toggling.

[lonny]

I started a thread about this some time ago.
Mail actually downloads attachments... I think that the progress bar in the activity window doesn't update.

Maybe there are some problems with BIG attachments, but leaving Mail doing its thing works for me.

[themacko]

I'm with sim, I don't have any complaints about mail.app. It does exactly what I need it to do, no more no less. Although, I don't get many emails with attachments so there could very well be a problem and I'm just not encountering it.

[ShowMe]

Wow. Thanks for all the response.

A few more details: I'm downloading from my company's IMAP server. 99% of the time this works great and (except for the lack of LDAP--a topic for another post) I'm happy with mail.app. But in the last couple of days a colleague has sent me emails with large (5-10MB) PowerPoint attachments. When I try to open the attachment, I get a dialog box telling me I need to download the attachment first. When I click download, nothing seems to happen. However, about an hour later, the PowerPoint application opens automatically and displays the attached file. [The first time this happened, I had completely forgotten about the download and I couldn't figure out why PPT had activated].

This is all annoying but not fatal. However, the SysAdmin for our mail server informs me that this little drill is putting undue stress on the server machine (50-60% CPU load). When I kill the mail.app (which requires a "force quit" or "kill"), the load on the server goes way down (3%). Also, when my mail.app is trying to download the attachment, it starts 3 (or more?) IMAP processes on the server. Not a nice citizen.

I wasn't aware of the "Activity Viewer" window. I'll watch that next time. But I have noticed that as the download is proceeding, the little arrows are spinning in the upper-right corner and a terse message--something like "Caching message 1 of 3"--is displayed in a banner above the mail header window.

Still a puzzle. Hope someone knows how to fix this. Otherwise, the SysAdmin is going to insist I use a different mail application.