Timothy Collett wrote: > To be clear, the Outbox does actually exist in Mail.app--it's > just not always shown.
Let me put it like this, then: I've never seen an Outbox in the current version of Mail.app, and I can't find any kind of preference to turn it on. However, that could be because it's buried amongst all the other preferences somewhere, which should tell us something about all of those "just make it a preference" discussions. Clicking on "Send" disappears the message. I've read that the Outbox sometimes appears if Mail.app is trying to send a message while you open it (i.e. you closed the app before it was able to send the message). This is such a non-obvious rule that it just serves to confuse people even further. > This has been a serious irritation for me on a number of > occasions, and I agree that the Outbox should, at the very > least, always be *showable*. I don't know if it's necessary > to have it always *visible* I think it gives the impression of instability, of hidden, magical things going on inside your application that you can't control, or perhaps even of potential problems. A disappearing folder is typically a good sign that you should run Disk Warrior on your Mac, and make sure that your backups are up to date. Folders jumping in and out of existence just isn't a good sign. The outbox on your desk doesn't disappear when there's nothing in it. Violating basic laws of physics seems unhealthy, unexpected, and confusing. It also pushes all the other folders and mailboxes up and down, which is annoying if you expect a specific thing to be in a specific place. LuKreme wrote: > On 24-Jan-2010, at 06:20, Lukas Mathis wrote: >> Here's a Mail.app issue I haven't seen mentioned yet: Messages don't >> always exist in a clearly defined place in Mail.app. Specifically, >> after I create a new message and hit "Send", the message essentially >> disappears. > Actually, they do. Any message you are editing lives in Drafts. I can't reproduce the behavior you're describing. For me, it works as I've described: 1) Create new message 2) Hit "Send" 3) The message is nowhere. Not in Drafts, not in Sent, nowhere. In fact, even if I save the message as a draft before sending, it immediately disappears from my Drafts folder after I hit "Send". At any rate, my point wasn't to discuss Mail.app's implementation details, but to say that we should make sure that messages always exist in at least one well-defined place in Letters.app. Like a folder or a mailbox, a message is an "object" and should follow the basic rules of physical objects that exist in the real world. It can't just not exist anywhere for a period of time, and then pop back into existence after it's sent. That is unexpected behavior, and will put doubt and uncertainty about the internal rules that govern the application into people. It will mess with their mental model of how messages in Letters.app work. People don't expect messages (or folders, or mailboxes) to just disappear. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment> Lukas _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list List help: http://lists.ranchero.com/listinfo.cgi/email-init-ranchero.com
