Mavericks and Mail, update

I said in my previous post two weeks ago that I would wait installing Mavericks on my main Macs until an update for the Mail problems arrived. Well, it came out last week (it even installed itself), and seems to have solved the smart mailboxes issues - at least the Unread count was correct on my MacBook Air, where I had Mavericks, and all mails there were visible and accounted for. So, I went ahead yesterday and installed Mavericks on my main office computer (an iMac, large screen, fast Fusion drive, excellent).

Alas, I had not tested it enough on the Air and perhaps not searched enough on the Internet. It was to be expected that Mail spent more time getting up to speed on my main machine, with 200.000 emails archived, it seems to be working still a day later. In at least one set of mailboxes, all mails appear to be empty: itemized and dated, but with no content. However, it is there (visible in TimeMachine), so the program is perhaps still working its way through, if not I can replace them from TimeMachine. Similiarly, the "count badge" for unread mails in a mail box also needs time to update smartly, but in a day or two it will, hopefully. Again, my advice from last time, to recreate the smart box definitions probably holds.

So, patience will prevail. But there are other issues that actually have been widely reported on the web and are clearly bugs and design flaws. There are temporary ways around them, however.

Sending group mail
The main error concerns group mail, that is sending mail to many people at the same time. This is the way it used to be done: In the Contacts (address book) app, you create either a "group" (a fixed group, by dragging cards individually into the group) or a "smart group" (dynamic, defined e.g. as "address cards that contain the word "Class2012""). Either way, you can email collectively to the group by beginning to type the first few letters of the group name in the To: (or, preferably, Blind Copy:) field in Mail. Then all items in Contacts starting with those letters show up in a drop-down menu, you click on the one you want, and it turns into the blue "cartouch" signet of a addressee, with a drop-down menu like "Expand Group" etc. Send, the mail goes to every member of the group.

In Mavericks Mail, you can do this for individuals, but there is also a new method, familiar to iPhone users: To the right of the To: field, there is a blue + icon, which gives access to the Contacts book and its groups. Click on a name, and it is inserted into To:. But that only works for individuals, not groups of any kind.

Now, what happens if you use the old method of typing a few letters? It varies. For fixed groups, it seems to work as it should: You type, select the correct item from the alternatives, and get the regular cartouch, both in the To: and Blind Copy: fields. But smart groups do not work like this. Sometimes you do get the list of choices, but no cartouch appears, nor does it expand into individual members when you ask for this (in Mail's settings). At other times you do not even get the list, and nothing happens when you type out the name in full. Apparently addressing smart groups do not work, which it clearly is supposed to.

But, in fact it appears it does. The feedback you get varies. Sometimes, you do get the list of choices, and when you select it, you will briefly see the name in angle brackets afterwards: "Class2012 <Class2012>" - although the name in brackets disappears once you Ok it. At other times it does not show you anything. But it appears in fact that the smart group function actually does work in both cases: Select the name if given a choice, or type it out if not (making sure you type the name precisely), press Send, and the mail will really go off to all members. At first I thought it only went in the first case (I wrote that ten minutes ago), but when I tried it out also just typing it out, with no indication from Mail it understood it as a group name, I heard back that the mail did go through.
     Why some smart groups give you the minimal feedback, and others not, I do not know. And I have not tested all my smart groups to see if they all actually work - it certainly is an error on Apple's part that they give no feedback, and of course that you have to rely on (precise) typing of a smart group name to select it. I would certainly suggest adding yourself as a recipient to groups you use, to confirm that the messages actually go out to the list
       A workaround can be used to give you peace of mind that it was sent as usual: Go to the menu "Window: Address Panel", find the smart group in question, click inside the list, then select all (Command-A) to select all names, and click on the To: (Copy:, Blind Copy:) buttons to address them individually. Not elegant - not if there are a lot of names - but will work for the moment.

Clearly, this is a bug, but it seems to me also a design error, in that the apparently preferred addressing method, the blue + icon, does not seem to have considered how to include addressing group mails.

There are some other minor bugs: While you can choose Bold or Italics for text you edit, it does not hold: underline works, size change and colour works, but bold and italics are forgotten.

Still hold back?
Now, many people do not use either smart mailboxes or smart groups, so they will not be affected by these problems. But they are not really esoteric, but fairly important and mainstream functions. Every new OS has bugs, that is to be expected, but it is peculiar that Apple released a version of the important Mail program, one that everyone uses, without checking these standard functions better. Personally, I think I will still hold back a few days before I upgrade my last Mac, just in case I find more problems, but these issues can be worked around, as I mentioned, for the moment. On the plus side, as these bugs affect fairly many users and is kind of another strike against Apple, it is to be hoped that they are aware of them and put some pride into quickly solving them. There is indeed reported to be a 10.9.1 on the way, but Apple released the first Mail fix in advance of that (untypically, they normally roll Mail app fixes into general upgrades), so we must hope these other issues will be quickly solved as well.