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A few nasty gotchas in Lion
Any major system update always has a few bugs and surprises, and Lion is no exception. There are two bugs that hit me directly -- one in Mail, and the other in working with network attached storage (NAS) devices. Let me hit NAS first. I have a pretty old Buffalo Linkstation that I use to back up lots of photos and my iTunes library. When I installed Lion it was nowhere to be found, although it was listed as a shared device in the Finder. The problem? All connections to it failed. It's not just my NAS that has this problem; products from Western Digital, LaCie and many other providers simply don't work or need a firmware update. Some vendors, like Synology and Western Digital, say a fix is in the works, but others are silent so far. So what is causing the NAS issues? Apple has changed the way file services work in Lion, and the result is the inability to communicate with many network storage devices. Lion requires netatalk 2.2 which isn't on most of these devices. This is particularly bad if you are using these devices with Time Machine. Let's move on to Apple Mail. I like the new layout of the app, except for the monochromatic buttons. When I fired up Lion Mail, it immediately failed with a POP account I've been using for years. I could send mail, but not receive it. I deleted the account, and re-entered the passwords and server info. Still no dice. A quick trip to the Lion support forums found lots of people complaining of similar problems. Nothing changed at my ISP, and that mail account runs fine on my iPad and iPhone, but it failed for both Lion installs I did. To nail the problem down as an Apple issue, I downloaded a free trial of Postbox, a Lion friendly email client. It worked fine with no issues with POP protocols at all. Since email is about as basic a feature as you can get on any computer, I'm pretty surprised Apple Mail has this issue. Many people are using POP just fine, but many are in Apple-induced hell right now. My guess is that some mail servers using older protocols or authentication just aren't working with Apple's ever-tightening specs. I'll personally wait a bit for that first Lion update, or perhaps I'll have to pull the plug on Apple Mail and move to Postbox. How about you? Were there some ugly Lion surprises hiding in the bouquet of wonderful new features? Share your experiences in the comments, both good and bad.
Lion Mail: Faster, full-screen, and feature-packed
During my testing of OS X Lion during the last month, I decided to take a break from my beloved Sparrow to see if the reboot of Mail.app could bring me back into the fold. I hate to tell the Sparrow team, but I'm heading to back to Mail. In this post, I'll discuss the features that have made me happy with Mail again. When you launch Mail for the first time after upgrading to Lion, the database will need to be updated. I chose not to do that, since I use all IMAP server, and just let Mail download the messages into its database. While I didn't time the process, Mail was able to bring all 40,000+ messages down from eight different mail servers in just a few hours. The process was much faster than it was under Snow Leopard on a more capable Mac. Adding new accounts has been simplified even more. After entering your name, email address, and the account password into Mail, the app checks to see if it "knows" about the email provider and if so, it automatically configures the settings for you. That's not all -- if your account (Gmail, Yahoo!, whatever...) also includes a calendar, contact, or chat, Mail asks if you'd like those to be set up as well. I added a Yahoo! Rocketmail account that I never read to my list of accounts, and it immediately tried to link me to the Yahoo! equivalents of iCal and iChat. The Mail UI has changed a lot (below), looking much more like the Mail interface on the iPad than the previous Mac Mail. Mail has been written as a full-screen app, so with one click it takes over your entire Mac screen. That's somewhat overkill on a 27" iMac, but perfect on an 11.6" MacBook Air. Enabling full-screen mode allows the app to be have its own Mission Control window. That may not sound impressive, but that means that with a few quick gestures, you can switch between Mail and other full-screen apps. The Mail toolbar (below) is slightly different, with a few icons that may be confusing even to seasoned Mac users. Get Mail is an envelope icon, New Message uses the familiar iOS "pencil and paper" icon, Note pops up a small yellow lined notepad for writing reminders or short documents, Delete is a trash can, and Junk is a new "thumbs-down" icon. One new icon is the Show Related Messages icon, which looks like a letter with a line over it. A click brings up any replies or forwarded messages that are related to the currently highlighted message. Finally, the Flag icon lets you apply a rainbow of colored flags to a message so that you can group message by color. As with previous versions of Mail, it's easy to customize the Mail toolbar to your needs. For individual messages, there are some new icons for the Message toolbar -- the Send icon is now a paper airplane, which has to have the Sparrow folks going berserk. There are also buttons for displaying the new Format Toolbar (used to format the text in a Mail message), the Photo Browser for adding photos, and Showing Stationery. The stationery in Lion Mail doesn't seem to have changed from Snow Leopard. Some of the new Message Toolbar icons are useful -- Append lets you include information from an existing email in a brand new message, while Lists is used to create numbered or bulleted lists in a message. The Format Toolbar (below) is quite helpful for creating nice looking Rich Text emails, with buttons for changing Font, Font Size, Color, Bold/Italic/Underline, Justification, and the Indent/Outdent of a paragraph. Reading Mail messages is a bit easier now as well. Message headers appear in default with just three lines of information -- the name and email address of the server, the message subject, and the date and time of receipt. Click a new Details link, and the header expands to provide you with extra information. Conversations (below) is a new feature to help organize chains of emails. At TUAW, we sometimes have emails that have 15 to 20 responses and forwards. Conversations groups together related messages automatically, with each email numbered to help with organization. One of my favorites is the Hidden Quoted Text in Conversations. If you need to see some of the previous messages to figure out why someone responded a certain way, there's a "See More from" link that appears in the message. With a click, you see the original text. Searching is tremendously improved over previous versions of Mail. When you start typing a search into the Mail search field, grouped search suggestions appear in a drop-down menu. There are also search tokens (below), which appear when you type in a person's name, a phrase, or some specific label. The tokens often have a small drop-down associated with them which shows available options. Search tokes can be combined to create very focused searches of your mailbox. Attachments can also be searched. Creating a search token for "attachments" looks for messages with attachments, and adding another search word will look for that word in the attachments. Data detectors have improved in Lion Mail as well. While in the previous versions clicking on a data detector would open iCal, now a mini-calendar pops up so you can see if you have any calendar conflicts. Have a hyperlink in a Mail message? A click on the disclosure triangle near the link brings up a Quick Look of the web page (below). All in all, Lion Mail brings a much needed facelift to Apple's built-in Mac email app. Have any questions for the TUAW crew about Mail? Leave a comment below. The images used in this article are taken from the upcoming Apress book Taking Your OS X Lion to the Max.
Google Voice adds spam filter, lets solicitors get caught in the web
Remember when your legitimate emails were flanked by dozens of grammatically nightmarish blurbs, peddling pills, x-rated services, and Nigerian scams? If you use Gmail, most of that garbage no longer arrives in your inbox, instead making its way to a spam folder, where it's held for a month before ending its journey at the Google graveyard. Now, Mountain View is applying that same concept to your Google Voice calls, flagging unsolicited calls, texts, and voicemails, then booting them to a spam folder. The company's servers use collected data from other users marking similar messages as spam, as well as propriety identification tools, to help ensure that those generic creditor or vacation sweepstakes calls never make it to your phone. And like GMail messages, misdirected calls can be marked as "Not Spam" from within the Spam folder, letting them slip through the fence the next time around. GV users can simply check the box next to "Global Spam filtering" on the Calls tab to activate the feature, or hit up the source link for the full scoop.
Darkfall video shows off new chainmail armor
Character wipes and the 2.0 relaunch may be foremost in the mind of Darkfall fans these days, but Aventurine has just released a new video that demonstrates its ongoing commitment to improving the existing game (not to mention its ongoing sense of humor). Though the clip clocks in at a paltry 50 seconds, that's time enough to get a good look at Darkfall's upcoming chainmail armor improvements. You'll also want to stick around to the end of the video for a cameo appearance by... well, we're honestly not sure what that was, but it looked big, angry, and vaguely like one of Agon's notorious AI mobs. Today's video release is the second part of a new Aventurine initiative called Media Sneak Peek, and you can view it after the cut as well as on the official Darkfall website.
MobileMe webmail balks at political bulk mailings
Unfortunately, as originally reported by John Brownlee at Cult of Mac, it looks like Apple may be filtering out emails sent from the online MobileMe client based on content. The story is that a user was trying to send an email mentioning "Authoritarian Oppressive Regimes," and when sent, those messages would not go through to their intended recipients, with no error message back from Apple. Cult of Mac sent a few more test messages through the system, and found that simpler emails with less political messages made it through just fine. There's a few things to note here: First, this is the web client only -- there's no indication that any emails sent via MobileMe's SMTP/IMAP interface are being blocked in this way. Second, Apple has replied to the CoM story to say that certain messages caught by spam filters may be blocked from sending through the web client, but that "Apple is not blocking MobileMe email due to political content." Anyone having a problem sending anything through MobileMe is encouraged to contact MobileMe support. Perhaps most importantly, when Apple's rep was asked why no error message was given, there was no further comment. That's perhaps the biggest problem here -- Apple can do what it wants with its own service (even if that's to block messages based on political content, as unlikely as that actually is, a private service can do it), but Apple should at least notify users when messages are being blocked. You could argue that Apple is trying to discourage mass email spammers from abusing the MobileMe system, and because of that doesn't want to clue spammers in on which message can and can't go through. That's a legitimate concern, but even so, if non-spammer customers are being blocked, there needs to be some way for them to be informed about the issue so it can be fixed.
AT&T to enable BlackBerry Bridge support before sundown
Most tablets function just fine on their own, but RIM's BlackBerry Playbook introduced a unique, yet restrictive interface that limits Bluetooth tethering to a similarly-branded handset. This feature, called BlackBerry Bridge, lets your tablet piggyback on a handset's 3G data connection, also enabling access to productivity apps like email and calendar, which are still otherwise unavailable on the PlayBook. Unfortunately, this option hasn't been made available for AT&T users, but that's about to change, as the feature will be added to App World today. While the Bridge suite is totally gratis, enabling the AT&T 3G data connection requires a monthly tethering plan of $45, which means anyone grandfathered into the unlimited data feature will need to decide if it's worth the jump. Bridge not sounding like your cup of tea? Don't worry -- at least you can take comfort in knowing that the days of pining for native email are numbered.
Clearing old addresses from Mail's auto-complete list
If you find yourself inadvertently emailing friends or colleagues at the address they quit using years ago, chances are Mail.app's Previous Recipients list is at fault. It's easy enough to clear out the cruft; just go to Mail's Window menu and choose Previous Recipients. Select the addresses you want to get rid of (Cmd-click or shift-click to select more than one) and then click Remove From List. So long, bad addresses!
Postbox 2.5 out with new Mac theme, 64-bit mode
Postbox is a favored alternate email client among the TUAW staff and version 2.5 was just released with a number of updates. This includes Postbox now running in 64-bit mode along with a new theme, interface and icon set that does much to make it look similar to the built-in Mail app, but retain Postbox's distinct style. Double-row vertical thread view is now supported along with a streamlined message view. In addition to all of this is a major price reduction. When Postbox 2 was released, it was US$39.95. It's now $19.95 with upgrades from Postbox 1 being $14.95. Postbox 2.5 requires OS X 10.6 and higher and is currently available through Postbox's site. The 2.5 version will be available via the Mac App Store soon.
New iCloud FAQ: Yes, there will be webmail
Since iCloud was announced by Apple on June 6, the TUAW inbox has been filled to capacity with questions about the many features of Apple's cloud computing platform of the future. Unfortunately, we have been just as much in the fog as you have about what features are moving from MobileMe to iCloud, and how the transition between the two services will take place. Today, Apple published an online document titled "Frequently asked questions about the MobileMe transition and iCloud" to clear away the confusion. As it turns out, I was wrong in my speculation that Apple was going to be getting rid of web-based versions of Mail, Contacts, Calendar, and Find My iPhone (as was our friend and former Engadget colleague Josh Topolsky, who apparently got some bad intel from a misinformed or confused Apple PR staffer). Fellow TUAW editor Chris Rawson disagreed with me on that speculation, and it turns out that he was correct. Apple has publicly stated on the FAQ page that "Web access to iCloud Mail, Contacts, Calendar, and Find My iPhone will be available at icloud.com this fall." Apple notes that "The core services provided by MobileMe have been rewritten to work seamlessly with iCloud." That being said, the FAQ shows that three services of MobileMe aren't going to make the transition -- iWeb hosting, Gallery, and iDisk. If you use MobileMe to host your iWeb-created site, be sure to read our posts on replacements for MobileMe hosting and WYSIWYG HTML editors for Mac. Apple has also posted a knowledge base article about transitioning your iWeb sites to another host. Of course, new features -- iTunes in the Cloud, Photo Stream, Documents in the Cloud, auto-downloads and purchase history for apps and books, and backup and restore of mobile devices -- are to be added with iCloud. That may be cold comfort if you're a longtime iWeb user, have complex iDisk workflows or extensive MobileMe galleries... but it's something. For those of you with .mac or .me email addresses, Apple is going to let you keep that address into the future. The company states that you can "move your MobileMe mail, contacts, and calendars, as well as your bookmarks, to the new service. When iCloud becomes available this fall, Apple will provide details and instructions on how to make the move." Apple also provides knowledge base articles on how to save MobileMe Gallery photos and iDisk files. Other highlights of the document include info on merging MobileMe accounts (not possible), using multiple iTunes account for store purchases and iTunes in the Cloud (possible), what to do if you will be using more than the free 5 GB of iCloud storage (you can buy more), and submitting a refund request for unused or partially used MobileMe licenses. Be sure to take a look at the Apple document and associated knowledge base articles as they're sure to ease your mind about some iCloud questions -- and possibly raise other questions about your life in the cloud.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: MailTab
Even with the upcoming overhaul to Mail in Lion, there are still plenty of alternatives for accessing your Gmail in OS X without going through the default Mail.app. Several TUAW bloggers are ardent fans of Mailplane, a US$24.99 app that turns Gmail's web interface into a dedicated email client. Then there's MailTab, which comes in two flavors: Free and a $1.99 pro version. MailTab sits in the menu bar and allows you to access Gmail's mobile interface without needing to access a web browser. It works fairly well and brought in my Gmail information automatically from where I had been signed in with Safari. If you're familiar with Gmail's mobile interface, it's easy to use. The only difference between the free and the pro version is that Gmail chat is added to the pro version. It also lacks switching between linked accounts. You have to completely sign out of MailTab to sign into another account. If you don't care to constantly fiddle with a web browser or have a single Gmail account, check out MailTab. But, if you have more than one Gmail account and want a more robust features that integrate with OS X, Mailplane is the better choice.
Mail gets major overhaul in OS X
It's the app we probably use the most, and Mail is getting some big-league features in Lion. Attendees at WWDC only got a brief glimpse of the new Mail app, but it's loaded with new and compelling features. The app has been completely redesigned, with a new multi-column view that looks a bit similar to Mail on the iPad. The app can intelligently select recipients as you type, and even suggest subjects as it parses your older mail. There are threaded conversations, and those can be easily saved outside of Mail. Threads even contain attachments. We'll have more on Mail as we learn more, but with Lion itself selling for US$29.99, the Mail upgrade alone seems like it's worth that.
Xerox's Business of Your Brain liberates your inbox from annoying coworkers
If you work in office, odds are your inbox is full of Oscar polls, baby pictures, fantasy football tips, and various other obstacles standing in the way of finishing up those TPS reports. Thanks to Xerox's Business of Your Brain, you can finally deal with the issue from the passive aggressive comfort of you own mailbox. The free Microsoft Outlook plugin lets you know who's sprinkling in the most exclamation marks and buzzwords per email, who sends the longest messages, and which senders are wasting your time with emails that just say "thank you." It's a nice start, but we think we'll hold out for the premium version that will detonate every Troll doll within a 50-foot radius. Now get back to work -- as soon as you're done checking out video and PR after the break.
Get email design chores under control with equinux Mail Designer
If you've ever had to code together a complex HTML email then you know how painful it usually is. It's like taking a trip back to 1999 before the web discovered standards and everyone was still doing table-based design -- only with the addition of cumbersome inline CSS, and the challenge of dealing with scores of different mail clients and their divergent HTML rendering. Unless you do this every day the process can be unwieldy at best and a downright nightmare otherwise. For most of us, learning to code our own email is way more work then it's worth. That's where Mail Designer, a new application from equinux, comes in; it provides a rich graphical email composer that goes far beyond what you'll be able to do in your preferred email client's editor. Mail Designer takes an iWork approach, focusing on a balanced feature set that makes it easy to use and hides all the technical bits in the background before sending your email to Apple Mail for delivery.
Nokia's Ovi Mail relocates to Yahoo, takes the scenic route to get there
Nokia's mantra for 2011 is change, and lots of it. A full-on shift to Windows Phone 7 ain't the only thing making waves in Espoo, though, as the overlooked Ovi Suite appears to be facing a plethora of alterations as well. Starting this month, Ovi Mail moved from its own platform and began migrating to Yahoo, the fruits of a "worldwide strategic alliance" between the two companies announced in May of last year in which Yahoo agreed to offer its Mail and Chat services to nine million registered Ovi users in exchange for access to Nokia's navigation and map services. Ovi Mail users have the option to either agree to the new terms of service with Yahoo within 90 days, or face the haunting reality of having the mail account nixed forever. For those who bite, the good news is that you'll now have access to Yahoo Chat as well as every other Yahoo service. The downside? Your contact list and emails may not all show up right away. According to Nokia's Ovi blog, the massive amount of information being moved to Yahoo has been causing delays, and many users are being left in the digital dark -- you know, completely without their contacts and emails. It could be anywhere between several days and a couple of weeks (!) before the missing data is accessible again, so we'd suggest using this golden opportunity to act on those vacation dreams you've been having. If we had to guess, we'd say you'll never be this hard to get in touch with ever again.
Sparrow 1.1 lands in the Mac App Store
The eagerly-awaited 1.1 update to the Sparrow email app (US$9.99) has landed in the Mac App Store, adding the promised features and bug fixes. The app now supports general IMAP, so for those of you who were waiting to add Yahoo!, AOL or MobileMe accounts to Sparrow and totally ditch Mail.app, you can now do so. For the many Mac users who use the app to access your Gmail accounts, Priority Inbox is now integrated into the app. My personal favorite new feature is a dedicated view for browsing your unread email. Simply choosing "unread" from a tiny pop-up at the top of the inbox displays only your unread messages. There's also an unobtrusive formatting bar for messages, so you're free to change the font, style, size, color, alignment and indention, or even add a bullet list in the compose window. One thing that made me surprisingly happy was the new three finger swipe multi-touch gesture for showing or hiding the preview pane. On an 11.6" MacBook Air, it's nice to be able to minimize the real estate taken up by the Sparrow window. If you've created contact groups in the Mac OS X Address Book, Sparrow 1.1 now supports using those groups for doing mass mailings to a team. The Sparrow team also fixed a long list of bugs in the initial versions, improved sync with Address Book, and added improvements to the mail database, scroll performance and memory use. The update takes little or no time to install through the Mac App Store, and for existing Sparrow users, it's a solid and welcome update.
Yahoo Mail gets IMAP patch, Windows Phone 7 data consumption catches a break
Yahoo had been pegged a few weeks ago as the culprit behind excessive data usage on Windows Phone 7 devices, sending far more information in replies to requests from the phone than necessary -- not really a big deal for those on unlimited data plans, but a legitimate cause for concern if you've got a data cap and overage to worry about (as more and more customers on AT&T do these days). Well, turns out Yahoo went ahead and updated its IMAP servers at some point in the last few days, fixing the issue and more or less obliterating the ravenous gobbling of kilobytes. If you don't use Yahoo... well, this is of little concern, but for the rest of you -- whether you're on a Windows Phone, an iPhone, or pretty much anything else with a limited bucket -- this should be music to your ears.
Yahoo: nonstandard IMAP implementation to blame for Windows Phone 7 data leak
Finally, what the world's been waiting for: an explanation from Yahoo regarding its role in Windows Phone 7 Data Leakage-gate. (And we suppose that you have a better suggestion?) Here it is, in full: Yahoo! Mail is widely available on tens of millions of mobile phones, including those running on Apple iOS, Android, Nokia Symbian, and RIM. The issue on the Windows Phones is specific to how Microsoft chose to implement IMAP for Yahoo! Mail and does not impact Yahoo! Mail on these other mobile devices. Yahoo! has offered to provide Microsoft a near-term solution for the implementation they chose, and is encouraging Microsoft to change to a standard way of integrating with Yahoo! Mail, which would result in a permanent fix. Now, we know what you're thinking: why is everyone always picking on IMAP? But at least they're working hard on a fix, and in the end that's what really matters.
Windows Phone 7 'phantom data' leaker unmasked as Yahoo Mail, fix due in 'coming weeks'
J'accuse... ! Remember the unnamed third party that Microsoft had found to be abusing 3G data on Windows Phone 7? Secret's out, and the culprit is none other than Yahoo Mail. According to a statement obtained by Microsoft guru Paul Thurrott, a fix is expected in the "coming weeks," but in the interim, you can mitigate the pain by going into settings and choosing less taxing options for "Download new content" and "Download email from" -- say, for example, "manually" and "the last 7 days," respectively. At least now you know exactly at whom you should wag your finger.
Real-life mailbox mod tells your iPhone when you've got snail mail (video)
Do you spend your days desperately awaiting credit card bills, coupons to Pizza Hut, and reminders from your dentist's office that it's time for another cleaning? We've pared down our dependence on USPS, but for those who still get physical communications of note, Make has developed an Arduino-based mailbox mod that sends push notifications when the post is in. Back in 2005, we saw a clunky device called POSTIN that did much the same thing. Thankfully, this system doesn't require an extra gadget, instead it sends messages straight to your iPhone. The postal alert system uses a snap-action switch, connected to an Arduino sensor, to signal when your mailbox is opened. A piece of code waits for the signal and then requests a URL from a PHP-enabled server, pushing an alert to your cellphone using the Prowl iPhone app. Die-hard USPS fans can check out the instructional video after the jump.
World sends 107 trillion emails in 2010, most of them about enlarging your stock portfolio
Hold on to your seats, stat lovers, 2010 is about to hit you with the full force of its quantifiable web exploits. Web monitoring site Pingdom reports that last year we all sent 107 trillion emails to our loved and unloved ones, which breaks down to 294 billion per day, though only 10.9 percent of those weren't spam. There are now 1.88 billion email users around the globe and when they're not too busy communicating, they're surfing one of the net's 255 million total sites (21.4 million of which are said to have arrived in 2010). The compendium of numerical knowledge wraps up with a look at social media, where Twitter still has a way to go before catching up with email -- there were only 25 billion tweets last year -- but continues to grow like mad, having added 100 million users during the year. Facebook added even more, 250 million users, and its thriving population is sharing 30 billion pieces of content (links, pics, video, etc.) each and every month. This isn't madness, this is the internet.
