Paul Förster <paul.foerster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Hi Adrian, > > I'm on a Mac w/ Big Sur (macOS 11.1) and use Apple Mail. I've been on Macs since 2003. Apple Mail is simple to use and I love it for exactly that. But Apple Mail has everything I expect a mail client to have, it does not allow a couple of things which other mail clients might have. Some people hate it for exactly that. I set Mail to always compose in plain text but there is no way of manipulating incoming mails other than that automatic displaying remote content (HTML links, etc.) can (and should) be turned off. > > So I sometimes resort to either hit cmd-opt-u to see the mail text raw source, or better yet, just hit reply and then drop the reply after reading. As I set composing to plain text, it will convert any quoted parts. Sometimes, I just copy/paste the whole mail for reading over to TextMate, which is also sub-optimal but obviously also gives me non-proportional font reading. > > Still, this is somewhat cumbersome as I have to do that for each mail individually. Thank god, this doesn't happen too often. Yet, it's still annoying enough. > I've used a number of GUI mail clients, including Apple Mail. However, I find still the fastest, most feature rich and powerful client is the text based client mutt. My other favourite is mu4e (Emacs client). While Apple Mail has reasonable keyboard shortcuts, mutt and mu4e can be fully keyboard driven and both have great (but different) abilities for customisation and dealing with large amounts of mail. The thing I hate most (and there is a lot to hate) with Outlook is the dependence on using the mouse for many operations. Being able to preview, sort, move, delete, messages and threads just using the keyboard makes dealing with mail much easier to deal with. Having a client which can do sophisticated sorting, flagging and searching messages/threads is essential and being able to easily automate where possible really helps. Highly recommend a mutt and imap combination. Your not locked into any particular mail folder format, can still access things via mobile devices and can process messages fast and efficiently. >> That is a learning curve thing. Many people don't know that copy and paste exists for terminals/GUI's/etc. Most people, once they are pointed in the right direction, will change that habit. That is why I would not advocate dropping non plain text attachments. Take this as a teaching moment and explain the reason why text is a benefit. > > I guess, they only change their behavior because copying/pasting some text is easier to do than creating a windowshot with aligning the frame manually, etc. But whatever the reason, thank god, some people are willing to learn that if being told. > It is easy to forget the different experience levels and sophistication of users. I once had to help resolve a problem a developer was having with a database. I asked him to send me the exact error message. He moaned and said that was a real hassle. I couldn't understand why he found that so difficult to do. I decided to get him to show me his workflow. When the error occurred, he would take a screen shot of his window, send it to the printer, wait for the printer to send back a PDF and then send the issue with the PDF attached. He was amazed when I showed him all he needed to do was highlight the error message, copy it and paste it into the message. This guy was one of the senior developers on the team. I switched employers a few weeks later. -- Tim Cross
