Earlier this week Yours Truly took a look at the Mail and AddressBook applications that come with Mac OS X. Since then, I’ve received some valuable reader feedback that everyone might find useful.
Some readers, including Searle Stuppel, have reported a problem with Mail’s multiple e-mail account support. With multiple POP3 accounts (even when each one is set to its own mailbox, and not all feeding into the Personal Mailboxes folder, it’s pretty common to get a “Cannot access mailbox xxx.mbx – it is locked by user xxxxxxx,” Stuppel said..
“This problem is noted in Apple’s Knowledge Base, but their workaround doesn’t ever work for more than a few hours (at least if you are using time based auto-checking of your mail anyway),” he said. “When you receive mail into more than one of the pop3 accounts at the same time, it hits this permission problem (and both e-mails tend to get deleted), so that’s a problem, too.”
Regarding AddressBook, Gerry Curry of Curry Systems & Consulting said that there doesn’t seem to be any way of adding a new column. He has found a freeware program that lets me make the window wider, but it just widens the existing columns.
“I have a lot of addresses for companies with no individual person’s name,” Curry said. “In fact, many of them don’t even have an e-mail address, so in Address book, all I can see for each of these listings is a phone number. In fact, because of the way Address Book sorts, the first 30 listings in my book only show a phone number. I want to add a Company column, but I can’t find out how to do that.”
Ideas, anyone?
“While I’ve been playing around with Address Book and Mail, I won’t be using them for anything serious,” Curry said. “They seem more like ‘technology demonstrations’ than anything else. Entourage is far more powerful, especially with its Palm sync and ties to Word, etc.”