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February 11, 2008

tips

Get to know the Activity Viewer in Mail.app

Posted Feb. 11, ’08, 5:56 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Tips

Activity ViewerIn Leopard, I have two problems with Mail.app. The first is that it refuses to quit when I’m done with it. It hangs forever with no explanation. The second is that it just seems to stop working. No new mail arrives, no actions are followed through.

The funny thing is that the solution to both lies within the Window menu as Activity Viewer. This little known pane is the status center for Mail.app. It tells you what Mail is really doing. The new activity pane is rather misleading. For example, mine always tells me that it’s a few messages short of several thousand incoming. Irritating to say the least.

Activity Viewer shows all the current connections and the actions being performed through those connections. Very handy. Even more handy is the fact that each of those entries have a stop button. I don’t know whether to blame Leopard’s Mail.app or Gmail, since I switched to both at about the same time, but things will get stuck. I’ll have a list of actions like 20 long, but no progress is being made.

Here’s the trick. By stopping the first couple activities, the rest of the list suddenly springs into action. When you’re trying to quit, this allows Mail.app to complete the synchronization it’s forcing upon you, allowing you to quit the dang thing without force quitting. Now if only the new activity pane was in sync with the rest of reality.


5 Comments

Shoaf said:

Is there something new in the Activity Viewer in Leopard? I'm still on Tiger, but I've been using Activity Viewer since at least Panther, maybe Jaguar?

That said, it sure wouldn't bother me at all if they added a bit more info or functionality to the new version!

February 11, 2008 6:40 AM
wesg Author Profile Page said:

Strangely enough, Derik, this is one of the things I miss about Mail in Panther, now that I'm on Leopard.

In Panther, the status was always shown in a small area below the toolbar, and I used it more often than I realized. This version of activity is still useful, but it doesn't give the "at a glance" information that the older version did.

February 11, 2008 7:26 AM
Erik said:

Under Tiger, I kept the Activity window open all the time.

It really saved me a lot of hassle when servers stopped responding, or connections dropped inconveniently.

(Or on the occasions when an email had a corrupt header.)

The Mail Activity pane under Leopard Mail is a decent way to tell if it's checking for mail, but it doesn't give me anywhere near as much information. However, it does save me keeping the Activity window open all the time.

I'm just happy that Apple left it in there.

February 11, 2008 7:31 AM
Dave-O said:

I became very familiar with the Activity pane under Tiger. Now that Leopard has added a notion of subscriped (or more importantly unsubscrbed) folders, I don't need it :)

February 11, 2008 11:05 AM
Anonymous said:

I am convinced it is a bug in the networking code. I have seen this problem with Safari, Mail.app, and Finder/.Mac. If I disable wireless everything clears up in seconds and I can enable wireless and go on my merry way. Also, if I force kill the app the problem goes away.

February 13, 2008 12:42 AM

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