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by m463 1964 days ago
I use macos to read mail. They have been chipping away at mail bit by bit.

I have always used it in what's now called "classic layout" - message list above, current message below, sidebar with accounts/mailboxes.

In the message list, I could choose what columns were shown, how wide they were and in what order.

I could just click on the top of a column to sort one way, click again to sort another.

This would let me find all the mail today or last week in order. or group by subject. Or find everything with an attachment. or back to sorting by date with today at the bottom.

What I was waiting for was smarter mail rules. maybe nested rules. Maybe smarter ways to interact (without resorting to applescript)

But they dumbed it down and there's a dropdown to pick what to sort (drop twice if the order they chose was not what you expected). You cannot choose your columns. You cannot choose the order. rules have not gotten smarter and with a name like "classic layout", I figure it is one update away from gone.

4 comments

I spend hours a day in my Mail app and I actually like the default layout as is.

But my coworker likes the classic layout, and another coworker likes the default layout but with expanded preview text to more lines. I wouldn’t go as far to say one preference is worse than the other.

I have a copy of Sparrow I've been dragging from computer to computer for I don't know how many years now. [sheds single tear]
I switched to Thunderbird because of this and because of the serious data loss bug in Apple Mail in Catalina [0]. Thunderbird is kind of terrible but at least it's dependably terrible.

[0] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...

The last time I tried to use the built in mail app (about a year ago?) I was met with some pretty serious bugs that made it unusable. Not to mention those smart filters didn't work.

It sucks that Apple has let it get so bad, but I personally wouldn't consider Mail part of the OS. It's just a built in App like garage band or something.

Yep, but fortunately they brought back the good old table view in Mail on Big Sur.