catalina mail column view

Remember that if you want columns returned to Mail (and lets be honest its not too much to ask for?) then don't forget to send your feedback directly to them >>>

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

I've posted the feedback several times. Mail in Catalina is now next to useless for me for anything but casual use. I am so glad I didn't upgrade(?) both of my MBPs to Catalina. I can still go to my Mojave MBP to do work in mail.

I don’t think it is a matter of writing code. This is exactly the kind of thing already in the object oriented window list class.

Furthermore the ability to sort and search has sorely been missing from the Rules pane in Preferences. It can be brutal to hunt down the rule that moved a message into a folder. As implemented, Mail rules are “write only”, in that the rules themselves are hard to read as the program code they really are.

And I’ll reiterate, Apple’s concept of “conversations” is a totally stupid worse than nothing take on message treading.

I miss Eudora.

Re iOS 13 mail app. Not only that (move is now under Reply, not a hamburger or ellipsis icon), the top two mail items stick, and new mail comes in underneath that, completely screwing the date ordering.

Petemcl, thanks so much for bringing to my attention that I posted my comment on the wrong thread. I’m new and somehow got away from the relevant thread I was working with. Luckily my own research paid off.

I understand your frustration that complaining doesn't change anything and quite often it doesn't. But believe you me - they will be forced in monitoring meetings to quantify the numbers of complaints about specific issues received in feedback and there will be questions asked about reasons behind removal of columns and feasibility of restoring them. These discussion forums are seen as places that Apple do not need to concern themselves with!

Also as an aside, noted that the icon for prioritization is missing from the mail message format. And there isn't one in the menu bar. You have to do into the "message" menu to find prioritization and when you set the priority the icon then appears on the messages where it generally used to be. As far as I can tell, there is no way to customize the menu to place it on the message format - it's gone.

Definitely not helpful since they don't discuss all of the functionality that they have ripped out of mail. It appears that their intent is to move mail from a tool that a professional can use for business to something for occasional use by lightweight users.

Thank you for the visuals, petemcl! Graphically demonstrating the problems with the newest (i.e. dumbed-down) Mail, c/w Outlook 365 (which is actually not quite as good as what Mac Mail used to be). Catalina's mail looks so stupid and Neanderthal compared with 365! With its "Sort By" click box, absence of personality (can't even decide on your own FONT!) and absence of USEFUL columns and column-headers that they USED to have in Mail! This is a graphic representation of why Catalina users would/will easily switch to the newest Outlook 365.

Another silly thing is the attachment column no longer says how many attachments are in each eamil. It just shows a paperclip to indicate there are attachments. Since almost all business emails include a logo, this becomes useless. I used to be able to quickly see from the number of attachments displayed whether it was an email with attachments I was looking for, or just a regular email. Why get rid of useful features like this?

Just sent to Apple via "Feedback":

. . . . . .

Running Catalina 10.15.2.

I have read that the lack of column headings and the lack of ability to select which columns to view, reorder columns or set column widths is a deliberate change by Apple.

However, I am reporting this as a bug because it is obviously a bug in the brains of the people making the decisions.

I have been a Mac user and influencer since early 1985, and your ever-acelerating push toward "usability" at the expense of true usability is infuriating.

PLEASE STOP DUMBING DOWN YOUR SOFTWARE.

PLEASE.

Thank you in advance for fixing this.

I've been using Outlook last week and it's really pretty "slick" (hip, slick, and cool) and I don't work for MS. But I had Office 365 anyway, just never thought about using Outlook but it even asks you when you start it to tell it what accounts you want to install and register, and then does it. Very slick so I was dreading the setup because of multiple accounts but that was very fast and easy. And it's got lots of bells and whistles we don't have - and the columns are like the old AppleMail.

I have the same complaint. The only way that Apple will revert to the previous features is if they get enough complaints (and I doubt that that will help ).

Over the past 3 months I have experienced several problems with Catalina and iOS 13 on my iPhone. I have tried to get satisfaction through Apple tech support and each time in came down to (in so many words) We can't or won't fix it so just deal with it!

Support is not good for these newer versions of software.

really really sad ... headshaking ... I just sent a request ((though for me it feels like a bug...))

split into three comments as each allow only certain amount of text .... sigh)

but from your experiences with apple support, I thought I needed to explain some power user workflow where looking quickly through columns by size or amount of attachements or timestamp (not only the date...) or changing order of columns displayed is important ...

I tried to get used to working without column headings, but the ability to quickly sort and change column widths is too important. What could possibly drive them to dumb it down. I don't want to be accusatory, but maybe they are tired of dealing with mail and all the headaches that come with it. This may be a kick in the pants to get us to moved on.