Mail is really below Apple standards

karavite

karavite

Registered
I have been using Mail for a year now, and although I like a few things about it, there a few annoying things I must vent about here.

1. Spell check is awful. Please fix it or let me send it to my Office dictionary. Sooooo many common words come up mispelled when they are not and it has an IQ of about 3 when it tries to suggest a correct spelling - meaning it often has none. It needs more power like auto correct. This is not rocket science - I said it before and I will say it here - talk to some poor laid of developer from Claris and get the code for their spell check - it was brilliant and the thesaurus was the only thesaurus that had an entry for "thesaurus." (in it's day - MS finally has this now)

FYI, please don't give me the work around for spelling services - I tried it and I saw no huge improvement - I guess i botched it, but I shouldn't have to be a system admin to have a decent spell check (remember, we are talking about a Mac running Apple software). Life is too short and I want this as standard equipment - it really isn't too much to ask.

2. Mail is the #1 crashing app on OS X on the three Macs we have at our house. More than IE which has been very stable for some time now. Do I need to say anything more about this?
 
I haven't had any trouble with Mail crashing.

I assume that you're talking about Cocoaspell when you mention the workaround? I've installed it, and haven't had any trouble. Seems fairly straight-forward to me... Ok, so you do have to go into the spelling menu to get it to use the dictionary you want every time (which is a pain) but appart from that it's fine.

I just got sick of it telling me "colour" or "organisation" was spelled wrong ;)
 
Right - cocoa spell - I followed the steps on some post on this forum, and it didn't work for me. I would rather waste my time complaining about Mail then trying to find the a person who posted it correctly. It is a matter of principle. Even if it did work out for me, doesn't anyone see the ironic absurdity that Apple's standard equipment email application has a vocabulary of a 2nd grader? However developed this at Apple probably has an IQ to match (this is intended to get them mad and then prove me wrong by fixing it)

You are lucky Mail does not crash for you - macosx.com is full of posts about this.
 
Mail.app doesn't crash here, either. And while it gets a lot of really long, complicated words wrong, 99% of the words I use it flags correctly and suggest the correct spelling when I get it wrong. I find it to be actually very useful.

Mail.app 1.2 (in Jaguar) will be VERY nice with the spam filter thing, although I rarely get any anymore. :)
 
99% of the words huh - do you keep a data file on this and run an analysis every week or so? I'm just kidding.

My point is this - Mail flags common words as being mispelled when they are NOT MISPELLED! This is ridiculous. Here is one - just did it:

surreal - Mail suggests sumrreal

How about some common proper nouns:
Detroit and Pittsburgh - Mail has no suggestion, but it has Phoenix and Philadelphia recognized as being spelled correctly???

!!! This kind of thing happens to me all the time, and though I have not saved every single example, in my case it has become a real nuisance. "Wait, I know how to spell that - but Mail says it is wrong and does not have a suggestion... Gee, I'll go double check it in Word or something (I often send letters to people where I don't want to appear illiterate). Gee, Word says it is okay. I was right after all and Mail just caused me to waste 39.4 seconds of my life (I may not have had Word open)."

I do not think that as a user I need to add common words to Mail's dictionary and/or verify spelling in another application, use a 3rd party spell checker... If someone finds this acceptable for Apple Computer in the year 2002, then fine, but it is completely inferior to spell checks in every other popular WP or email app I have used on a Mac or Windows. Although Apple does amazing things, they are harped on by the press and Windows users for the smallest mistakes. Mail's dictionary is an embarrassment and sub standard. I know they can do better and they should.

Tell you what, I'm betting this will be improved in 10.2. If so, I would take that as strong evidence that someone at Apple cornered the slacker who put this together and told them to shape it up.
 
I found out that after I changed the mail app icon, it took ages to load and crashed so i ad to force quit it many many time! I reverted the icon to its original and mail stopeed crashing. So maybe changing the icon isnt such a good idea. I have Mac OS 10.1.5. Now, maill app runs smooth as butter!


Much Love,

Rita

The Mac geekette
 
Some of us probably won't be using it after September :)

I like Mail 90 percent of the time.

I love the feature where you can set it up to check your mail every minute.

It does have some strange quirks, though.

I haven't had a problem much with the spelling.

I use it sometimes to check words when I am unsure.

Maybe that will be my main use for it come September 30. :)

I think I am going to direct mail back to AOL a.k.a Spam City.

I will miss Mail.
 
I guess what I have not made clear is this - I like Mail and want to use it as my main email application, and the only thing that gets in the way of that is spell check - a problem that has been largely solved in other applications for many years. Maybe I use more "big words" than some other people and/or I need to be more conscious of correct spelling in many of emails, so the "it works fine for me" response is important for revealing that users have different needs, but it doesn't address my own needs - Mail needs a more complete spell check dictionary and it needs to be a little smarter in the suggestion area (the dictionary may help this, but that isn't neccessarily all it will take).

Then again, If Casady and Greene would hurry up with the OS X version of SpellCathcer (a really powerful spell checking app), I would buy it in a second. That combined with their app Grammarian would give anyone, even picky users like me, all the language based tools one could ever need in any application. I suppose Apple can't do it all, and if they did (like Microsoft) it may turn off a lot of 3rd party developers, but a company that produce the first ever easy to use Unix front end should be able to make a decent spell check in their email application.
 
I am on OSX 10.1.5 on a new (mid-May) superdrive iMac. When I 1st got computer, it had 10.1.2 installed, but upgraded to 10.1.5, which promised a more stable Mail app.

I do like the simplicity of Mail, the interface, etc. Previously had been using Outlook Express, & I just found it clunky & its interface clunky. So Mail, for me, is much better.

But two things bug me: One is the very frequent messages I get re: "if you open up such-&-such mail-box, you may damage its contents". I was quite concerned, but a number of posts indicated that nothing bad will happen, it is just a buggy message. It irks me, & means that "extra click" to get rid of the message. I think it might really be a problem for newer users, people new to OS X, not to mention the "switchers". And not every type of user checks out the forums.

Second thing is the very poor Mail Help. A while back, I was concerned that my attached PDFs, when viewed in the "sent" box, appeared inline. I strongly believe that any word which is used within a menu or within the app should be searchable. But... I found absolutely nothing when I searched for "attach" or "attachment". I found out, on a MacFixIt forum, that appearing inline is just a Mail "feature".

But surely, if Apple wants to encourage switchers & people on older Mac OS systems to move to OS X, then their apps Help should be much more robust.
 
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