Apple Mail: Auto Correction stopped working

Well, you know, I upgraded to Lion without even reading one review because the switch from Leopard to Snow Leopard was so good -- But Lion slowed down my computer so bad, and then with what I mentioned before; I wanted to die ... so yeah; try it a friend's first, or don't upgrade at all, it's gotten some really bad reviews.

OK.

I was reluctant in the first place when I read some reviews when it got out.

Then I've seen it work on someone else's new Macbook Air and it seemed good.

But that's different from using it yourself. I guess I'll install it on a 2nd drive and test it...

I don't know whether to be happy or not that I am not the only one having this issue. However, I think I may have solved it.

Open a new mail message, go to "Edit", then "Spelling and Grammar" ensure that "Correct Spelling Automatically" is checked. Then go to "Edit", then "Substitutions" and ensure "Text Replacement" is also checked. This worked for me in Mail. I now just need it to work for Safari!

Thanks.. I tried it and it did NOT work for me.. 😟 I was very hopeful though.. I checked all as above and still did not work.. I didn't quit and reopen, so I'll try that.. but unless you hear from me otherwise, it didn't work.. Back to the drawing board! 🙂

In 10.7.2 if you go to System Preferences>Language & Text>Text and select "Use symbol & text substitution" you can select which built in autocorrect substitutions to use and you can use the "+" to add your own. This will work in Mail and I believe other core apps, I think including iLife but have not tested it.

Unfortunately it does not work for iWork. For iWork unfortunately you have to go to preferences>autocorrect and select/enter what you want to use there. Likewise if you use MS Office for Mac you also have to do the same thing in preferences>autocorrect for Offic apps.

Give it a go and see if it solves your problem.

I "upgraded" to Lion on my mid 2010 MBP and it put me out of business. I ended up buying a 13" MacBook Air, full spec, with the factory Lion installation and except for an occasional really minor glitch, mostly with Mail quitting, it has been brilliant and I really like it. Some of this is the MacBook Air I suspect as even with the slower CPU the configuration and use of flash memory makes the thing much faster than my MBP ever was. The MBP is now with Apple getting completely wiped and a fresh factory install of 10.6.8 and I'm going to gift it to my nephew as I was planning a MacBook Air upgrade anyway as I am an international "road warrior".

Interestingly I also upgraded my MacPro to Lion and it's been pretty smooth, really no positives or negatives to speak of, a "non-event" so far. I also upgraded my wife's 2010 iMac and that has been ok as well. So it seems to me that there are some hardware configurations coupled with software issues where the Lion upgrade just does not play nice. I'm not very happy with Apple because this is the first time in 10 years that I've had these kinds of problems with an OS upgrade but Lion and it's subsequent improvements and fixes is the way forward.

I beleive it is a marketing ploy to force unhappy Snow Leopard Mail users who want all of the perks of a spell checker to upgrade to Lion which is known to be working and that the "fix" is on their low priority list, as nothing has worked thus far since the update of 10.6.8. Either that or they can't seem to find a fix at all unless you do make the upgrade. We may never know unless they tell us.

Thanks for the feedback on the various hardware behaviours.

As for me, I finally upgraded to Lion on my MacBookPro Mid-2007 (2,4 Ghz, replaced 500 Go HD 7200 rpm, 4 Go RAM) mostly because I wanted iCloud to work fully (and autocorrection...), but I'm disappointed that the Apple-announced performances improvement actually aren't there on my MB, although its CPU is as fast as some recent Macs.

Not to mention the neverending hangings on startup, the autoselected "Resume" on Shutdown or the fact that I had to wipe out my Bootcamp partition to get the Lion installer to work... (due to Restore partition stuff).

On the design part, I think removing color from the Finder icons is really a mistake. Not functionnal at all.

I'm also furious that a very specific subtitling Windows software I used within VMWare Fusion doesn't work anymore (no video). I guess Lion is handling differently video hardware than the previous OSs. But that's another subject...

Apple really disappointed me on that one.

Message was edited by: bersound

Hi Larry, I'm also Iainsmummy but for some reason I have come in under another user name. I also did that at the same time I tried the rest, so maybe it was that. I still don't have auto correct on Safari on the MBP, so I am now using the iPad!

I still think that when Apple upgraded Mail in Lion that they must have changed some settings in the original app. I had to manually go in and change my google mail back to a pop account when I upgraded to 10.6.8. My iPad still uses the iMap version. I'm not sure how the spell checker in imap works whether it is using the spell checker from Google or Apple.(?) I just know I don't want to go back to imap on my iMac.

Here is how I fixed it...could it be that easy....I opened up a "new email" window and started to type a word with a spell error. The word is then underlined RED. If you right click on the underlined word the contextual menu has a "Spelling and Grammer" submenu, I went in there and found that "Check Spelling while typing" and "Correct....automatically" were disabled in Mail although I did enable automatic checking/correction in System Prefs. So, now it works in Mail, I get the usual BLUE underlined words that were corrected and GREEN underlines work as well....

If you think it is this plist is the culprit, trash it (or drag it to the desktop). Empty the trash bin. Restart the mac. Mail will make a new one.