catalina mail column view

No worries, as far as battery life is concerned I'm unable to say, as I tend to keep my MacBook Pro plugged in. Let's look forward to having a proper Apple Mail back later this year and hope that Apple reflect on this fiasco and learn from it for the future.

Having only recently moved to Catalina, I am very disappointed to find I cannot select what information I show in column view in Mail and no longer can adjust column width and column order. Come on - why this big step backwards and no correction through the various versions of Catalina? The idea of waiting for Big Sur to fix this (and allowing for avoiding so many other issues by not being an early adopter) means a long time until a fix.

Could not agree with you more. I always upgrade my MacBook Pro to the new OS to make sure it is workable for me before I upgrade my home or office iMacs. To this day, I have not upgraded any iMac to Catalina because Mail is completely unworkable for me and those in my office. I reasonably (or so I thought) assumed that Apple would respond to the outcry in an update and have been very disappointed. I have been looking for candidates to replace Mail, but have not found anything that I like that also works with both SpamSieve and Mailbutler, so I am very pleased that Apple making the fix in Big Sur.

Thanks for this important "revelation", which should not have had to have been a "revelation" but a clear update note from APPLE. Really!!! How dare these engineers and software developers train us to loyally use their system and then arbitrarily change it and SCREW their users without any notice. Apple. You may be one of the richest companies in the world but you've also become one of the cruelest. Yes cruel. Arbitrary unannounced changes to apps used 24/7 by your loyal users should be COMMUNICATED, not buried in the system for us to frustrate through for hours trying to reset our apps to work the way we're accustomed to. Very unthoughtful. For a daily used app like Apple Mail, great as it is in so many ways, Apple needs to update more often instead of one a year per OS, and also be more responsive to users. If you can't do that, maybe it's time for Gmail.

"Arbitrary unannounced changes to apps used 24/7 by your loyal users should be COMMUNICATED" You shouldn't be surprised. This has happened before, so expect it from Apple. The worst reason to update your OS is when Apple gloriously announces all kinds of new "trinkets" in the OS (most of which are meaningless to those of us using our Macs for business or career and not for "looking pretty"!) that haven't been vetted by real world users. Exactly why I am still using an OS from a few years ago. So, don't be shocked, surprised, or allow yourself to be 'romanced' by Apple's marketing. I am SO glad I didn't update to Catalina!

A couple of systems ago, the iOS version of the app store changed significantly. Previously, when there were available updates, opening the App store went immediately to the place where you chose which ones to update. Since that change, however, opening the App store takes you to an advertisement. You have to touch an unlabeled and meaningless icon to get to the place to choose updates. The message is clear: making a profit is more important than functionality.

This suggests that Apple made the change to Mail.app in Catalina because it was part of a plan that they thought would make them more money. They must think their customers are all teeny boppers who do nothing more profound than write fancily formatted emails about their vacations to exotic locations. Whose primary use of a computer is for the latest social media craze.

I've been using Apple computers for over 30 years. They need to learn that if it isn't broken, don't fix it.

(by the way, have you every tried to print an email in Mail.app without also printing the contents of any attachments? last I looked, it's not possible)

My apologies for contributing late in the Catalina update, but after I updated my mac I spent too much time wondering if I clicked on some link that removed my columns in my Mail. Please bring them back. I rely on organizing my inbox based on needs of sender. With the pandemic & receiving even more emails, I desperately need this to help my household function. Aside from the daily email from retailers, government correspondence, former employer updates & the endless amounts of emails from my daughter's school (district, teachers, specialty) my mind is in overload. It was a feature that was a structural dependency; something I chose to merge my several accounts. But now I'm pondering removing my accounts & separating them if the functionality of the Mail doesn't support my lifestyle. Please bring it back. We are all overwhelmed with having to adapt to a new normal & technology we rely on to get us through understanding & staying connected.

Stay safe & thank you,

Amy G

Did anybody update to 10.15.6? Did the columns get restored in that update? I turned off auto-updates for the first time in 13 years of using apple products over the columns disappearing from mail with Catalina.

After all the discussion on this particular thread, why in the world would you update without waiting for feedback from others to verify that the issue(s) are satisfactorily resolved? You will likely now be one of our guinea pigs.....thank you for volunteering to be that!

Hip Hip Hoorah Gary!!! Thank you SOOOO much for posting this. I was one of the lucky ones who found out about the classic view deletion with Catalina BEFORE I upgraded. I was sitting with my son on his computer and told him he should change his view and realized he could not. Then I went to this discussion page and learned it was true, with the upgrade, the classic view disappeared so I have been avoiding my upgrade. Of course over time all the old versions start to cause problems and I have this crazy bug with Mojave that happens every couple weeks where suddenly when I open a new window in any app, the window is a small shrunken box in the upper left corner of my screen and all my sized columns settings are messed up. I have to resize everything and then reboot my computer about 4x over the course of a couple days for it to go back to normal. It's CRAZY. So I just googled hoping MAYBE Big Sur would have classic view and I could upgrade my MacBook - and I found your post. Thank you so much for taking the time to put this in. My son just told me I should bite the bullet and go to Outlook if I really can't function w/out classic view. You just made my. night!! Yippee!!!

P.S. TOTALLY agree with your message to Apple - let us know when you fix something that everyone is complaining about - alert the discussion feeds please.

Thank heaven Big Sur is going to restore the Column headings. The drop-down menu is extremely time-consuming! A real aggravation all day long. That change to drop-down was a terrible idea. Let's not change for the sake of change! thank you Apple for listening to your users.

Does this mean there's still no way to sort our mail in Catalina? I finally upgraded to Catalina two weeks ago and have been trying to figure out mail ever since.

This could truly result in my leaving Apple mail after decades of evolution. Is this an arrogant development process or standard fare in software development?

To join in the "discussion"

I'm curious if there are any design reasons for the change to the mail viewing options

I was happy as things were, so it doesn't seem like progress from my perspective.

But, perhaps there's another perspective where it IS progress, and I'd like to know what it is ??

Said above "Additionally, archived Sent Items no longer show who the emails were sent TO, only who they were FROM."

I sure hope this is being 'fixed' too in the next version of mail. For me this is more troublesome than the 'column' issue.

This kind of continuing failures by Apple to put the users FIRST is why I refuse to update my OS until it is shown (in this discussion forum, for example) that the Mail program works!! All of you who update automatically without checking things out first are making a BIG mistake. Witness previous issues with Photos and iMovie, for example. Mail appears to be in the same category....at least for me it does. In this case, I am waiting for all you guinea pigs to experiment and then tell us when it is OK to load.