Snow Leopard Review – Mail.app
Here is the first of a couple reviews for Snow Leopard as I am choosing to break it down and do it feature by feature as I use the programs in Snow Leopard. Keep in mind that this is the developer copy, and it may explain why some of the features don’t work like you might expect them, but it still doesn’t make it right. I started work today by taking about 30 minutes to install OS X 10.6 onto my iMac. It did a full upgrade leaving all of my programs and files intact. This is always a plus with any kind of upgrade as it is always a pain to back everything up, and start from scratch. And as a consumer, I am more likely to upgrade if it is made easy, and this was an easy upgrade. Enough about that, let’s talk about the new mail.app.
The first thing you will notice that is different are two more account types in side mail.app that you can choose from. You can now choose Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007, as seen below I have elected 2007 as that is what we use at work. There is also an option to share this with iCal and the Address book. I left them checked.
After what seemed to be a successful setup, the mail began to load. It was exciting for about 10 seconds until I noticed something strange. The received dates for every mail item was the same. They were all showing today at the time that I started syncing with the server.
As you can see in the right column they all loaded at 9:23 AM. This just isn’t true since I have mail in there from October. I then tried to delete some e-mail. Click, nothing? Click, Nothing! CLICK!!! still nothing. Open up an e-mail and try to delete, nothing. Use the delete button on the keyboard… nothing. Let’s try a test send… but the send button is grayed out. Then I finally noticed it, those two annoying words that always appear when you want to modify something, READ ONLY. Look at the top of my inbox next to the account name and you will see that is says read only.
I tested mail.app with other accounts, like my gmail and that worked (well except for the out going because that port is blocked here). And then I tried my business account and that worked, and is still working perfectly. So the problem is Exchange, or at least how we are interfacing with it at some level. It could be that since this is a developer release that it is not fully functional yet, and they just want to show that it can talk to the server. Perhaps something has to happen on the server end? I don’t know because I’m not a server expert. All I know is that right now, it’s not working and I still have to use Microsoft Entourage (man that leaves a bad taste in my mouth).
Another thing that you will notice about mail.app and a lot of other apps in Snow Leopard is that they are going on a diet. In OS X 10.5 Leopard, mail.app is 287 MB compared to its size in OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard where it is only 91 MB. That is a difference of 196 MB. And across the board apps are losing weight. To see more weight loss visit Apple Insider.
Keep checking back, I will be reviewing Safari 4 in the next couple days. I am using it right now, and so far so good.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.