catalina mail column view

Apple has lost all control of their own design system.

Everything is arbitrary now and subject to random change.

Many of us chose Apple because of their conceptual integrity, which is what made their products delightful to use. That's all gone, now and we're drifting on fumes from when Apple understood design. What a horrible loss.

You sort of have a choice right now, but soon the tradeoffs will overwhelm you.

I have dreamt of freezing a machine on an old OS with an older version of Adobe Creative Suite installed on it. But ultimately, I won't. The costs of being out of sync with the rest of the world is too high.

I promise you, you'll be on Catalina or later within a year.

Absolutely disagree. My 5 Macs are on various operating systems, including 2 on Snow Leopard, believe it or not (for the sake of certain peripherals). The others are on High Sierra. All for my business. Gives me much flexibility. And, I guarantee you I will NOT "be on Catalina or later within a year"!! Why would I do so? (Especially so, given what I am reading on this thread!) I have yet to see a reason for updating and my business doesn't have the time nor patience to deal with the issues that frequent updates bring on.

Well then, I salute you. If more people did what you're doing, perhaps product managers would be more inclined to do thorough concept and usability testing on their stuff before foisting it on paying customers.

It seems the next question is: What mail application shall we migrate to? Because this current iteration is not going to cut it. For those who have commented, have you tried any other mail applications, such as Spark? Thanks.

Since I already have a subscription to Microsoft Office 365 because I use a lot of Excel and Word, I have access to Outlook for Mac. It is a far more useful application than Mac Mail but migrating to it may leave emails behind - those that are on your Mac and not in some cloud. Outlook also requires bringing over your contacts. You'll have to decide for yourself whether the extra work and possible extra cost is worth the benefit. The point of my original email was to draw attention to another case of Apple engineers arrogantly "improving" Mac mail without notification and without a chance for users to say No.

there's fine third party software that will migrate all your mails from macmail to outlook, from macmail to thunderbird and from outlook to thunderbird. i used OLM converter pro and haven't found any loss of information in my 22GB mail archive so far.

i am using thunderbird now - it just feels better than outlook to me (and i do have MS365 with access to outlook)

with an exchange account you'll need an extension like exquilla or owl to use thunderbird.

OK - so now we know Apple have absolute contempt for their customers !

Catalina 10.15.5 just released and yet again an opportunity to correct this mistake has been Ignored!

It seems that Apple still don't understand the depth of feeling about this self imposed restriction in the performance in their key application.

I won't be updating and if people don't world wide then they might just sort out this very simple issue to correct.

https://www.apple.com/feedback/mail.html

It's over Kernow13! Apple have corporate motives which preclude attending to the concerns on this thread. The writing is on the wall. These days I am concerned about the bigger world picture of the corporate agenda. Of which Mac Mail column view is a very minor symptom.

This COMPLETELY SUCKS.

Being able to change column widths and positions, click column headings to sort, and choose which columns to display is a BASIC FEATURE OF A COMPUTER.

Why does Apple insist on taking away basic and important functionality like this?

I archive my messages locally on my Mac, including sent messages. Once messages are moved into my local sent folder, the "To" column does not exist, and therefore I cannot sort by "To" to find messages I sent to different individuals, something I need to do quite often!

The inability to adjust column widths means that if I need to see just a little bit more information, I can't.

This is really a STUPID change, Apple. Get your act together and stop making the software more and more retarded with each new version.

My guess is they plan to add some feature that requires a more predictable layout among all of us. The feature will be cool in their minds, but worthless considering the capability sacrificed to accomplish it.

He did not. He was very polite, but no insight. If (big IF) I were to read into the conversation, I'd guess it had to do with upcoming changes elsewhere ... maybe integrating iOS with OSx?? When your market cap is a trillion dollars, I suppose you start to lose your way.

This is horrible UX. By messing with the columns (effectively removing them) you have ruined the search features within the mail programme. What was the thinking behind this? Were customers consulted? Or is this a prescriptive design change?

I don't know what "cool" feature they want to implement that required sacrificing something so basic yet so important, but the Mail program has been getting progressively worse with each new version. I've been looking for alternatives but haven't found anything that instills much confidence in me. There are commercial mail programs for Mac but I'm wary of those because things like that tend to become unmaintained after a couple of years and I need to archive (and search through, and navigate through) emails long-term. The only viable free one I know of is Thunderbird, which is awful, but at least it has a track record of being consistent and maintained long-term. I would prefer to use the built-in Mail program but sadly Apple has been ruining this program. The lack of columns makes Mail pretty much useless anymore.