I know, I know: my profile says that Terminal is my one app I couldn’t live without, but that’s only because it’s too hard to pick just one. You will, however, notice that the first icon in my Mac’s dock is Mail.app. It’s the first program I run every morning, and the last I quit. So it’s good to see that Apple’s paying it some attention in Leopard: and I’m not talking about HTML stationary (blech).
My favorite new feature in Mail are data detectors, as I gushed about on the most recent podcast. Ever get an email with somebody’s contact information, or an invitation to an event? Sure you have (if you haven’t, let me know: I’ve got a kickin’ party to invite you to). In the olden days, you used to have to copy and paste said information from the Mail message into Address Book or iCal. Man, we had it tough.
Leopard’s Mail simplifies that with the aforementioned data detectors. Now when you see an invitation: “dinner on November 16th” for example, mouse over it and you’ll see a gray dotted-line appear around the information, along with a little triangle. Click the triangle and you’ll get a contextual menu offering to let you add the event to the appropriate application. Even cooler, selecting that icon will pop up a panel for that app right there, meaning you don’t even need to launch iCal or Address Book. Sweet, right? It certainly makes it a lot more likely that I’ll actually remember to add events to my calendar and people to my contacts.
While we’re at it, an anonymous reader pointed out that Mail’s also fixed one nagging bug: it recognizes nicknames entered in your contacts’ listings. My solution for this in Tiger was to add a group called “Dad,” for example, that only contained my father’s email. Now I can just add “Dad” to his nickname field and Mail will figure out who I mean when I type “Dad” into a To: field.
This is great. I've never been good at keeping track of names, addresses, and phones numbers, etc. My Dad made a big word doc for all that. It's a table with the cointact information for pretty much the whole family tree. I use that word doc as my address book because I'm too damn lazy to type it all into my address book.
Now I can just cut and paste the text into an email and use data detectors to finally get the information where it belongs!
You really do have it rough, Dan. I can't imagine what it's like not knowing you father's name :)
You missed the really BIG change, the ability to subscribe/unsubscribe from IMAP boxes. Finally, I can stop monitoring Mail's activity to get things done (it had a tendency to prioritize downloading messages from a junk-filled public folder over sending and reading messages).