MaxStocker.com > Blog > Mac Mail Sillyness

August 2008

Mac Mail Sillyness
Posted : Sat August 30th

Can a community change?
Posted : Wed August 27th

Enough with the AJAX already
Posted : Tue August 26th

Fun with Tomcat
Posted : Sat August 23rd

Design trickyness
Posted : Tue August 19th

Garbage in, garbage out
Posted : Mon August 18th

The hidden costs of older apps
Posted : Sun August 17th

Closing JDBC resources
Posted : Fri August 15th

Accident or Google Conspiracy
Posted : Wed August 13th

Excitement
Posted : Fri August 8th

Time for ISP responsibility
Posted : Fri July 25th

Keep a lid on it
Posted : Tue July 22nd

4 minutes till doomsday
Posted : Tue July 15th

It's your name, you should own it
Posted : Mon July 14th

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Mac Mail Sillyness
Posted : Saturday August 30th, 2008

For the record when it comes to Mac I am firmly in the camp of ambivalence. It's not for me but if you like it that's fine.

What I don't care for is those who suggest that Mac is "the only way" or "the right way" and a good example of why I don't like it can be found in the basic Mac Mail program.

When sending an email with an attachment with this program there is a checkbox (seemingly left unchecked by default) that reads "Send Windows friendly attachment". If this checkbox is not checked then attachments sent are in fact not viewable with Outlook on Windows and if checked, they are.

So the message and it's implications seem fairly clear. You have to take an extra step on Mac, a facility graciously provided by the developers to acommodate dirty, smelly old Windows and it's unenlightened users.

Except.

It's all a big sham. Sending an attachment without the box checked means that files attachments are sent in a non RFC compliant way. So it's not just Outlook on Windows that can't open them. No mail program on any platform can open them with the exception of the Mac mail program. Thunderbird on Windows? Won't work. Thunderbird on Linux? Won't work. Any other mail program on Mac? Won't work. Hotmail and Gmail? Won't work. (Are you discerning a pattern here?)

What that checkbox should read is "Send attachment in standard (RFC compliant) way" because that is really what that option means. The alternative being to send it in a proprietary Mac Mail only way.

Only Apple could create a broken (by standards) email program and then blame it all on Windows (which has nothing to do with the problem or solution) and get away with it.