OK, I know I've shared this before, but it still continues to crack me up.

It's about SOUND in the Mac Mail application. I have it set to play a sound for incoming mail. Meaning, I get new email, and the Mac is supposed to "tink" or whatever the hell.

Here's what happens on a top-of-the-line Dual PPC G5... Mail comes in. I notice the burst on the dock icon or in the open mail window. "Oh," says I "New mail"... whereupon I read it. Respond. Go on to something else...

TINK

um... what? Did you just friggin' tink me? Like a minute and a half AFTER I got the new email? Are you fucking kidding me?

You know what? Let's have tsunami warnings that don't sound until after the tsunami. Let's have fucking phones that ring after you pick them up. Let's have alarm clocks that go off after you wake up and take a shower and leave the house.

Sweet christ. I have a very hard time believing Apple can't fix that. But it's been that way forever.

Oh, soo typical for OS Slow X. I've experienced similar stuff, mainly when too much happens at the same time (wow, that's some great multitasking, it shouts "i'm inefficient"). OS X saves all that stuff that has to be done in a qeue and does the stuff one after another, no hurry. Sweet little OS. This includes clicking too fast, resizing windows in a hurry, switching apps. Nearly nothing gets lost, but the slowmotion-behaviour is a laugh.

Typical X-Men could now say: "Oh, an old G5, well pretty outdated. That machine's propably not fast enough for mail." <cough, cough>

Could the tink be coming when the email is finished downloading which sometimes takes a bit of time to happen.

In a production studio my guess is that large files are received at times that would take a minute and half to download.

I say this because my Uncle sends me large emails that show up in the dock but take a minute or so to fully load.

Naw man, this is ANY email. Just plain text ones too. I'm sure it's that I have several email accounts, and when mail shows up in one, it goes on to check the others. And it doesn't tink until they're ALL done checking. But that means the checking is so fucking SLOW. It shouldn't be that slow. Or, all the bursts should be updated at the same time, and THEN you play the tink. After the cycle is through. That makes far more sense. Then the alert sound is an alert for something.

This way, you get an alert for crap you've already seen and dealt with. Hate that. So then I go through these periods when I turn the sound OFF. Because it fucking makes me crazy. But then of course I'm not always paying attention to the dock or the Mail app window, and I miss mission critical emails, when I should have looked at them right when they were incoming.

Thalo,

As you know, I recently switched to Mail as my main email app. I just heard from a client who said that they are receiving two files for every one I send them. This sounds reminiscent of and "Apple-double" setting that I might need to change, but I can't find any settings. Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you know of a solution?

Thanks
Thanks

Brad
Brad

That's a weird one. Normally that happens if you send email to somebody and then cc the same somebody. Or hit reply all to somebody who's cc'd themselves.

It could also be that you have two SMTP servers active on the same account. In the account info, try checking "use only this server" next to Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP).

I'm still troubleshooting the problem. I don't see any relevant settings for anything like that in Tigard's Mail. But I may have solved the "won't delete mail from server" problem. As usual, it's OS X's fault. Bad interface design. There's a checkbox that says "Remove copy from server after retrieving a message." That seems simple enough. But underneath that is a pop-up menu that was defaulted to "When moved from Inbox." Well, I'm one of those who tends to either delete a piece of mail or leave it in the Inbox. A few get sorted to other folders, but not many. So basically as long as those pieces of mail are in the Inbox, they're not going to be deleted from the server. So I chose "Right away" from the pop-up menu and it seems to be working. A checkbox used to mean "Do this this that the checkbox says." But it was diluted. Had the pop-up menu been immediately to the right of the check-box text, I would say that would have been much clearer and more logical.

As you know, I switched to Tigard's "Mail" as my main mail client. (Sounds a bit like a male escort service.) The problem I'm having is that when I attach a jpg (either via drag-n-drop or via clicking the "Attachment" button) that in my friend's Outlook program (in XP, I believe), it doesn't show up as a savable attachment. There's no little paper clip icon showing an attachment, nor does it show up in Outlook's attachment windows. The jpg is embedded and it makes dealing with it a hassle. When I attache an eps image, it works fine. Does anyone have an answer to this? Is it some preference I can change in Mail or a preference my friend can make in his Outlook mail program? Or is it just a cruddy fact of life for how Mail 2.1.3 handles jpg's?

Does anyone know if there is a leading alternative to Mail for OS X?

The answer to your previous problem is to simply zip, or stuff the file. Put it in an archive format easily understood by PCs.

For some reason, jpeg (which is a compression format) is handled fine by some mail clients inline, for others (older versions of Outlook, for example) it has to be clearly contained or encapsulated.

As far as I know, there is no leading alternative to Mail. Apple is playing the Microsoft game here, so well integrating the app into its operating system, that competition is falling off. I'm guessing Eudora and Entourage will always be around, but if you're looking for advanced features it's probably going to be Mail. But if you have to spend the money on the new 2008 Orifice, you'll at least have something to compare to.

Yes. Thanks for the answer. That concurs with some things I've learned from a client. He's got Office 2003's version of Outlook and apparently those in-the-know avoid it like the plaque. Apparently (and this is second-hand information, of course) this version doesn't play well with OS X's and/or Mail's files. I'm still in the midst of troubleshooting, but some answers are making themselves plain.