Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with Mail and applemail

A man can't be too careful what he signs these days...

Bromius — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:27:58 -0800

Why won't Apple Mail let me attach a signature to my emails? Having decided to put on a veneer of grad school professionalism, I made a signature for myself for use in Apple Mail. It's nothing fancy; there's no HTML or any images. It's just my name, title, address and phone number. I access a Gmail account and a university account through Mail, so I created two identical sigs, one for each account.

Now the pulldown signature menu appears with each blank email I open, but it's stuck on the default "None." No other options appear on the pulldown. I've Googled around, and I'm confident that I have all the signature settings set correctly---on the signature menu, each account has the correct sig assigned to it, not "None." I've even restarted my computer a few times since I first tried setting this up, and nothing's changed.

So what am I doing wrong?

The Perfect Mail Client

tejolote — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:28:57 -0800

I switched to mac recently, and hate applemail. I don't think thunderbird will do everything I want, at least it didn't a few years ago. I want something like Pocomail, easily scriptable and enhanceable, and perfectly reliable (and easy and standard enough for me to fix on me own when there are problems). But Pocomail doesn't have a client for macs.

Also, I am going to have to gamble that whatever I pick will keep being updated and maintained over the years. I have a lot of mail and I really hate to move it around. In fact (I have some mail I've been unable to get to after a year now, but that's another question altogether).

Suggest mail applications for mac, preferably with some of the suggested parameters! Help me get to read (and sort) my vast tracts of mail.

How do I get Apple Mail to stop re-caching my messages all the time?

mkultra — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 05:34:31 -0800

Apple Mail keeps re-caching my messages... I use Google Apps for domains for my email, which is basically the Gmail engine. I've got 2 computers polling the same account via IMAP, both on 10.5.4- my laptop is fine, but my desktop is always Caching my messages over and over (I can see this in the activity window). In addition to having a lot of disk churn, it's eating up crazy space on my Time Machine every day. The desktop has this problem whether the laptop is on or not, so I'm pretty sure it's not some odd race condition with flagging messages.

What gives? I've tried deleting and re-creating the account, but I can't figure out which file holds the actual headers (when I re-create the account, the message list comes back immediately, intact)?

Bonus question- how do I selectively remove my recent mail message backups from Time Machine? It's about 100G I'd like to reclaim.

Apple Mail Address Woes

alitorbati — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:24:08 -0800

How do you get rid of unwanted email address that appear when sending a message in Apple Mail? This is a picture of what I want to delete. As far as I can tell, there is no way to get rid of the addresses.

Help me open an Apple Mail attachment on my Windows PC.

analogue — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 11:16:21 -0800

Help me open an Apple Mail attachment on my Windows PC. OK, a bunch of you are going to think that this has been answered before, but to the best of my ability I could not find a pointer to this exact problem.

I have a super important E-mail attachment which I received from a Apple user who used Apple Mail. The attachment arrived in my gmail as "noname" when really it should have been "proposal.doc". I've tried opening this attachment both on a Mac and a PC and both just show it as:

--Apple-Mail-10-226900443
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: application/applefile;
name=proposal.doc
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="proposal.doc"

AAUWBwACAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMAAAAJAAAAPgAAAAoAAAADAAAASAAAAB0AAAACAAAA
ZQAAAR5XOEJOTVNXRAAAUGxhc3RpYyBTdGFyZmlzaCBwcm9wb3NhbC5kb2MAAAEAAAABAAAAAAAA
AAAeAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAHgB209gCbAAAABwAHv//

--Apple-Mail-10-226900443
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Id:
Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
x-mac-type=5738424E;
x-unix-mode=0644;
x-mac-creator=4D535744;
name=proposal.doc
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="proposal.doc"

0M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAbwAAAAAAAAAA.. (tons of garbage)...

--Apple-Mail-10-226900443--

Now, I've tried a bunch of stuff before resorting to askmefi. I've tried saving the file locally and renaming it. I've tried stripping the first part of the encoding (the Windows friendly fix thing, but that still didn't work and that wasn't the problem in the first place because I couldn't the file on a Mac either). I just don't know what else to try, but I'm desperate because without this attachment I lose a full day of productivity.

Where are my e-mails?

purplefiber — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 16:30:15 -0800

Apple Mail has suddenly stopped retrieving my messages... I have Apple Mail set up to receive messages from several gmail accounts and a hotmail account. This has always worked with no problems, but for some reason on Tuesday it stopped receiving messages from all but one account. I am able to read my messages by using Gmail in my web browser, but this is very frustrating since I use Apple Mail to categorize and store e-mails. I tried Connection Doctor, and tried changing/updating my passwords... no success. Has anyone experienced this? I especially can't understand why ONE account still works.
Thanks!