Mail pain

One of the big attractions of Apple devices for me has always been that they let me get on with my work without getting in my way. Software that focuses on letting me get my job done without distraction or glitches is a big plus for me, and Apple has done a great job over the years of delivering just that… until recently.

Mail in particular is beginning to wind me up. There has been a series of bugs over the last year and it seems as soon as one is fixed, another is introduced. The latest annoyance is Mail showing read messages as unread (the blue dot next to the messages doesn’t disappear). Things work fine for ten minutes and then I have to quit Mail or switch folders to get it working again. It doesn’t stop me doing my job but it’s an irritation and I’m beginning to ‘think flaky’ rather than ‘think different’, which is not something I usually do with Apple.

I have to hold my hands up and say that I have Mail plugged into our office Exchange server, which I guess puts me in the minority. It also means that I don’t have a huge choice of mail clients. Postbox, for example, looks really interesting but I can’t use it without enabling IMAP on the server which isn’t something I can get done quickly. I moved to Apple partly to get