Mail-application

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ie99enda

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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.:mad:
 
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.:(
 
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
 
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
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Well POP, by default, will download the mail to your local computer. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but IMAP will read the mail live on the server, not locally, so I suppose you are taxing the server. I never used IMAP, but maybe this will point you in the right direction. Maybe something in Mail.app's prefs.
 
The plot thickens. (For history, see previous posts in this thread.)

OK. I looked at the Activity window. After asking to download the (large) attachment, it shows a "download" in progress, with a blue & white barber pole (it never even gets to the point where it displays the slowly growing blue progress slider?! At least not after a minutes, which is all I waited before killing the activity with the "stop" sign).

But...I've figured out an ugly work around. If I select the offending message header from the IMAP account and *drag* it to my local mail account (on my Mac), it works just fine (and, at least in my configuration, deletes the message from the IMAP server). So I can get my message, I just can't keep it cached on the server. What a nuisance.

Given the comments from others (some in this thread), I'm not the only one having this problem. I'm still hoping to hear that someone knows how to fix this, rather than work around it. Thoughts?
 
Originally posted by hazmat
Well POP, by default, will download the mail to your local computer. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but IMAP will read the mail live on the server, not locally, so I suppose you are taxing the server. I never used IMAP, but maybe this will point you in the right direction. Maybe something in Mail.app's prefs.
Click to expand...

In the "Advanced" tab, set the "Keep copies of all mail for offline viewing" option and it'll cache all messages so you aren't waiting on the imap server everytime you click on a message.
 
Kinda off-topic for this one but what's in your .ppt files that's 5-10MB? Unless you're showing video in PowerPoint something probably could be optimized. Back in the days when I had to abandon Director for PowerPoint I often used the built-in compression features of PowerPoint to make the files much smaller. There's other tricks too but that's a topic for another thread.

My point is... your colleague could probably significantly reduce the file size before sending it out. Not only are uploads/downloads faster but your sysadmin will appreciate the reduction on your mail servers.

Cheers
Don
 
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