Monday, November 5, 2007 |
10:36 - Hosanna to the email gods
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Mail.app might have its problems, and not all its "enhancements" for Leopard really qualify for the name (though, to be fair, this one is hardly Apple's fault).
But something I've been waiting for for years—ever since the Mail that shipped with 10.1, that first started warning you about self-signed SSL certificates and not giving you a way to auto-accept them in the future—is finally here:
Hooray! Now I can launch Mail and forget it, and not have to wait around for it to ask me about all my self-signed mail-server certs! Woo-hoo!
I'm not sure if this counts among the 300+ "features" in Leopard, but it sure makes the cut for me.
Oh yes, and also, now when it can't connect to the most-preferred SMTP server, it gives you a nice visual list of other servers to pick from, and it includes the one that it just unsuccessfully tried! Before now, it would remove the just-attempted server from the list; so if it was just a matter of your SSH tunnel to localhost not being up at the time, you couldn't just start the tunnel and have it resend the message—it would try to send it through the next SMTP server in the list, which might not be what you wanted, and it would keep going until it had removed every server from its list of possibilities and you had to start all over. If you wanted to retry that same SMTP server, you had to cancel the send operation (by saying "Try again later"), and then resend it, using a new SMTP server list that includes your most-preferred one. Perfect example of what happens when the designers think they're being so very clever—they end up making life gratuitously more difficult for power-users for almost no material gain for non-power users. This new solution, where you get to pick the same server and retry (after restarting your SSH tunnel), is worlds better—and no less usable for novices, at that.
Leopard Mail might not have many fans, but I for one will wave a tiny little flag or two for it.
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