Likelihood Apple Improves Mail?

Thanks for the input. I’ve tried that and it works, Gmail is very powerful. Here are my stumbling blocks:

  • I have an integrated inbox for my personal and professional emails. I misspoke when I said I have three accounts, I forgot my graduate course account for the class I teach. Ideally, I’d like my iCloud and Gmail accounts showing up in a unified inbox.
  • Chrome and Brave are memory and battery hogs so I hesitate to use them.
  • It is a little clunky for getting email links into apps like Craft, Obsidian, OF. Durable but copy/paste but often a drag and drop works better. This is a minor issue in the scheme of things. :slight_smile:

That said perhaps I really should give Gmail apps and the web version another try.

With all the focus on security you’d think Apple would block pixel tracking in mail.

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@WayneG I have a follow-up question. I can’t find a way to find/copy an email URL link from within the Gmail app (on the browser this is easy). Is there a way to get a link to an individual email in the Gmail app (iOS/iPadOS)?

They sort of do, by allowing you to choose not to load external images.

Of course blocking tracking mechanisms is not just related to blocking 1x1 pixel or off screen images. It’s very difficult to say if such a pixel/image is a tracking device or a genuine image to load. (even though a 1x1 pixel image is questionable)

Also if a mail app allows full sized images to be loaded but not 1x1 pixels , then Ad agencies would quickly switch to normal images for tracking purposes.

I agree mail app makers, including Apple, could do more but I think ad agencies have more money and options to stay ahead in that game.

Find the actual URL? Not that I know of. However, when you are looking at a message in the Gmail app you can tap the three dots in the upper right corner and select “Add to Tasks”. This creates an item in Tasks titled with the subject of the email. The same function in available in webmail.

Clicking on the envelope “attachment” (Re: April Report) in Tasks, either in webmail or the IOS Tasks app will open the email message.

Correction: I just discovered that in webmail you can drag the “attachment” (Re: April Report) from the item in Tasks to the desktop to create a link to the email.

That is helpful to know, thanks for taking the time to provide the information. That said, that seems more complicated than dragging and email from AM to an app. I guess unless something compelling comes along I’ll stick with AM on all devices. Certainly a first world problem! :slight_smile:

Good luck. Email is a relic from a simpler time. A problem that can never be solved, only replaced by something else.

I wish there was a better option. I’ve tried Slack but for me, it was just another busy noisy inbox. :slight_smile:

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My experience is that Apple slowly improves Mail over time. I use it because I hate email and want to spend as little time as possible looking at it!

I must be an odd duck :duck: I don’t hate email. I use it and manage it and try hard, not always successfully, to not allow it to manage me. While there are times I wish I never had to look at my inbox again, overall, I would hate to consider how hard it would be to get knowledge work done without email. Perhaps I lack creativity! :slight_smile:

I went on vacation for a week and when I got back to work, I had 1500 unread emails. To me it is a roadblock to doing real work.

BTW, the way I handled the 1500 emails is I read the 50 emails from my boss and team and deleted the rest. If it was actually important, they can email me again.

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Wow, that is terrible and seems to me to be ridiculous. No wonder you hate email! If I had that many emails from my boss and team I’d never leave for vacation or seek to the extent of my authority and/or influence to modify organizational culture to reflect best email practices. Per Carl Newport’s book on email, your company may need a culture change, IMHO. Not for me to judge, but…

I’m guessing here, but there seems to be a LOT of other emails that seem like that may be unnecessary. Train some of the senders to send them to someone else? Flag some as Junk? Create rules for other emails? Unsubscribe whenever feasible? Maybe more meetings, phone calls, and fewer emails?

Again, I can’t assess your particular circumstances and perhaps 1,500 emails in a week is unavoidable but I’d sure like to think that something could be done to reduce the number of emails to a more “manageable” 500/week. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Sorry you have to deal with such an email overload!

My team uses Jira to manage and plan our projects. So the amount of email I get from my boss and team is less than 100 a week. It’s the rest of the company that resembles more of the hyperactive hive mind that Cal Newport describes in his book.

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Meaningful updates? I doubt it unfortunately. :frowning:

That was a perfect solution.

A few years ago I read that Daimler has a program called “Mail on Holiday”. When an employee is on vacation their email server will auto-respond to incoming messages notifying the sender that the person they emailed is on vacation, and that their email has been deleted! It also gives the sender the contact information of someone who can handle any urgent matter.

Just imagine having an empty Inbox when you return from vacation. I thought it was a great idea.

My executive didn’t :grinning:

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Well that was prophetic!

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Once upon a time, I was changing the language my Mac was set to, to get the text string of the “Load Remote Content” button in various languages (long story).

Now my Mail.app flags are stuck in one of those languages (I think German): Naranja, Rot, Lila, Blau, Gelb, Grün, Grau. In spite of long since switching back to English.

Better yet, the foreign flags have followed me to my new Mac. Sync’ed via iCloud, I imagine.

Flags, yep, they’re buggy.

Agree that this is a requirement. But, Mail.app never opens emails for me. I don’t show the preview pane. My layout is set to View > Use Column Layout, and I closed the preview pane. Works great. Looks a lot like Eudora, which I used until the bitter end.

Might only appeal to grumpy old men like myself, but it works. (Kids! Lawn!)

As we all know now, this is in Mail.app in macOS 12.

But if you want it now, there’s a neat, free Mail.app plugin, MailTrackerBlocker. Gruber linked to it a while back. On GitHub: GitHub - apparition47/MailTrackerBlocker: Email tracker, read receipt and spy pixel blocker plugin for Apple's default macOS Mail

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Apple’s session on Monterey MailKit is today. It should shed light upon what features we can expect. It looks like Apple’s going to be content to let 3rd parties extend the Mail.app through vetted frameworks. I hope we get some positive news. The Action extension is particularly interesting to me.

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