"AOL said it blocked an average of 1.5 billion spam messages each day."

Top ten spam subject lines:

1. Donald Trump Wants You - Please Respond
2. Double Standards New Product - Penis Patch
3. Body Wrap: Lose 6-20 inches in one hour
4. Get an Apple iPod Nano, PS3 or Xbox 360 for Free
5. It's Lisa, I must have sent you to the wrong site
6. Breaking Stock News** Small Cap Issue Poised to Triple
7. Thank you for your business. Shipment notification
8. Your Mortgage Application is Ready
9. Thank you: Your $199 Rolex Special Included
10. Online Prescriptions Made Easy

I'm still reasonably happy with Mail.app, but, as you know, it involves computers and I hate computers. I share hate now:

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Is there any documentation on what the flags field in Mail.app .emlx files is?

Mail.app in 10.4 stores each message in its own file. The first line has an ASCII integer on it, the length in bytes of the message; then comes the message; then an XML "plist" blob with a few key/value pairs like "sender" and "subject". One of those properties is "flags", holding an integer, presumably bits indicating "unread", "replied", etc. But there are a lot of bits set in there -- some otherwise-uncomplicated messages seem to make use of up to 30 bits. What are they?

Update: Please, people, I asked a very straightfoward question. I'm not interested in your guesses. I can guess too. I'm looking for facts. I can also reverse-engineer at least some of it, if I have to. But I'd rather not, if it's actually documented somewhere. Which is why I asked. If you don't know, put your hand down.

Update: An anonymous benefactor has the goods:

0	read	1 << 0
1	deleted	1 << 1
2	answered	1 << 2
3	encrypted	1 << 3
4	flagged	1 << 4
5	recent	1 << 5
6	draft	1 << 6
7	initial (no longer used)	1 << 7
8	forwarded	1 << 8
9	redirected	1 << 9
10-15	attachment count	3F << 10 (6 bits)
16-22	priority level	7F << 16 (7 bits)
23	signed	1 << 23
24	is junk	1 << 24
25	is not junk	1 << 25
26-28	font size delta	7 << 26 (3 bits)
29	junk mail level recorded	1 << 29
30	highlight text in toc	1 << 30
31	(unused)

Thank you Mask Man!

Update, 7 Aug 2005: I've posted my Perl code to parse these files: emlx.pl. Using this code you can, e.g., ssh in to your mac and see what messages Mail.app has downloaded while you were away.

How many times do I have to click on the "Junk" button before Mail.app will realize that anything from Paypal or Mail Delivery Subsystem is spam?

I think I've finally gotten all my mail imported into Mail.app. It was a tedious, glacial pain in the ass.

What's a good typing-break timer? I grabbed Time Out, and it seems ok... it's kinda ugly, though. And it's more insistent than what I'm used to (XWrits).

Update: AntiRSI is a lot better looking.

I want a dock button that means "create a new Safari window". If you click on Safari in the dock, it opens a new window if there are none; but otherwise it opens some existing window. I want a fast way to always get a new window. (I imagine this is a Small Matter of Applescript...)

Update: There's a "New Window" menu on the right-click context menu on the Safari icon in the dock, which is close enough.

I love that in Safari, Cmd-Shift-click does "Open Link Behind..." (opens a link in a new window, but stacks that window behind the one youre curent looking at.)

However, is there some way to change that binding so that Cmd-click does that (without a shift)? One of my mouse buttons sends Cmd-click, so I'd like to be able to do "Open Link Behind" without using the keyboard. (I could change that button to send Cmd-Shift-click, but that would be less convenient in other applications.)

Update: Please stop telling me how much you love tabs. I'm happy for you, but I think they suck. You needn't elaborate on how wonderful you think they are. I get it.

I'm getting along with Mail.app OK, but it's weird that:

• You can't click in the "unread" and "flagged" columns to change the status of a message (you need to use a toolbar button instead).

• There seems to be no way to put a "next message" or "next unread message" button in the toolbar. I really miss that. I find myself scroling and visually searching a lot.

I really wish I could get it to save a copy of my outgoing messages into the folder of the message to which I'm replying. Right now I'm doing BCC and then manually refiling my outgoing messages, but that's annoying.

Update: Please stop mailing me to tell me "just Cmd-click the Sent folder to see your incoming and outgoing messages together." That conflates the entire Sent folder with the current folder, not just the subset of Sent that are replies to the messages in the current folder. It is, therefore, totally worthless.

Also, my BCCs make the "you have new mail" flag go up: it's not smart enough to not notify me about mail from me. To get better notifications for incoming mail, I'm using the "Mail Notification" AppleScript that came with Growl, and having my mail filters run that when putting messages into certain folders. I guess I could just hack that script to be silent when the mail is from me...

Ok, guess what? The Mail.app importer discards the "Date:" header and uses whatever was in the envelope ("From_") instead. So, not only is this bogus (the send-time is more interesting than the receive-time) but it means that it's going to mis-date just about all of my really old mail, since those have correct Date: headers but seem to have in their envelope the date at which they were converted to "mbox". I blame Kyle Jones.

This means I get to write a script to parse all those Date: headers and regenerate the envelopes. How many times have I done this? Then re-import the mail again. How many times have I done this?

*sob*

otterley: I gave up on IMAP because the server is just far too much of a pain in the ass to figure out how to get running.

So I'm mostly using Mail.app for email now. I like the UI, and the filtering and junk mail stuff seems nice.

I don't understand what the done thing is with respect to multiple identities; how do I partition things into "jwz@jwz.org" and "jwz@dnalounge.com" worlds, given that I have only one mail server for both? It doesn't want to let me add an "account" with a duplicate (or missing) mail server.

Update: Aha! An "account" is per mail server, but you can have more than one address per account: type commas between them, and a "From" menu shows up on mail composition windows.

Also, is there any way to get it to save a copy of my outgoing messages in the same folder as the message to which I am replying, instead of putting them all in Sent?

But OMG is importing my old mail slooow!

Now I understand that A) I have more mail than just about anybody, and B) mail importer modules never get any real love, since nobody ever uses them more than once, if at all, but geez, it takes roughly 1 second per message! And that's just to import them: the first time I select an imported folder, and when I leave the folder after I've marked all "read", it does some other incredibly slow thing...

And it's making iTunes skip. I'm actually somewhat surprised by this; I thought I read that OSX had some realtime scheduling features, and I assumed that iTunes would be taking advantage of them. Guess not.

Attention: Please only fill out this poll if you are actually a Mac user. I don't give a flying fuck what you use on Windows! I honestly didn't think I had to spell this out, but apparently I do.

Poll #511923 Fight!
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Browser:

Mail:

AIM:

IRC:

Please explain your answers. Especially if you said "Other!"

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This is kind of an interesting idea: it's a proposal for a new way to show message threads that differs from the standard way in that, instead of the "message pane" showing just a single message, it shows all the messages in the thread, more like an indented web forum.

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Is HTML mail finally sufficiently ubiquitous that one can simply assume that anyone you send it to will have the ability to read it?

I'm looking for statistics on popularity of mail readers, and having a hard time finding any. Do any of you know of any?

My random wild-assed guess would be something like:

• 40% Outlook
• 30% AOL
• 25% Yahoo/Hotmail/etc
• 4% Eudora/Netscape
• 1% everything else

Eudora has shitty HTML support (it displays basic tags, but not tables). However, I think all the others on that list display HTML properly. (If my guesses are right, that's 95%.)

(Please note! This is not an invitation for you to tell me that you use /bin/mail in an 80x24 terminal emulator. I'm looking for numbers, not a survey of the personal preferences of power-nerds.)

Update, Jan 4: The most believable numbers I've seen are these, at clickz.com; they are approximately in line with my guesses. I think it's safe to assume that Damned Near Everybody is capable of receiving and properly displaying HTML email (though of course they may not prefer it.) Thanks to zonereyrie for pointing to that survey.

It's just baffling to me that someone would be capable of downloading a source package, running a compiler... and then think that the sensible thing to do when there's a compilation error is to email me a 1280x1024 TIFF screenshot of the text in their maximized terminal window.

I asked the guy, "are you mad?"

He said, "I just thought it would be good if you saw exactly what I am seeing."

Don't get me wrong, I think things are better now than they were before: every day, there more interesting stuff out there than the day before. There are more voices, and by Sturgeon's Law 90% of them are crap, but that other 10% continues to increase in raw numbers, and that's great.

But it sure was a lot easier to manage stuff back when it was all just email and USENET. There are two pretty basic ideas that have all but vanished in the interfaces we use to acquire information, and those are "subscription" and "mark read."

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