Mac Mail 6 is missing the "spinning wheel" indicator when checking for new mail

Just "upgraded" my wife's MBP to 10.8.2 and noticed that the connection indicator is gone in Mail.

This is not the first time this feature was tampered with. I don't remember which OS update changed the sequential checking of email accounts, but I think in Leopard one could watch as each account was checked in sequence. This was very useful to me as I'm on a slow satellite connection. After it was changed to check all accounts at the same time, I started to get frequent timeouts, so that I can only auto-check three of my accounts and have to do the rest manually. I suspect it was not deemed useful any longer since Apple assumes everyone in the world is on high speed internet. It's one more reason not to upgrade from my favorite SL for a long while.

My kids are all running ML but did not notice the problem as they all prefer Postbox over Mail.

What goes up....must come down.....spinnin wheel.........where are you? Do the boffins at Apple read these posts?

splinterhead wrote:

What goes up....must come down.....spinnin wheel.........where are you? Do the boffins at Apple read these posts?

No. And the Software Engineers don't either.

Annoying indeed.

Apple, there ARE people who have more than one email account and still want to see a little bit of what is going on - not converted iPhone touchies who expect the same amount of intransparency and user-needs-to-know-nothing-attitude on the Mac...

Instead of removing something useful - how about adding long needed stuff like different check intervals for different mail accounts? Please, guys, don't be so microsoftish...

Mail has 2 progress indicators that allow you to see what's going on, just how many do you need?

please read the thread as to why those aren't the same and do not provide the same functionality nor are they as elegant. most people in this thread are aware of those options and they were discussed previously.

it isn't the number of indicators that is the issue, people don't want *more* lower quality indicators obviously.

they want the clean, elegant, informative indicator that used to be just perfect and gave them all the necessary information and more information then either of the alternates you suggest without having to open a kludgy second window or another sidebar pane.

the sidebar pane doesn't show as much information nor does it show the status/activity per account, it is practically useless. the activity window can't be docked to the main mail.app window and it doesn't minimize/hide with the main app and has to be manually delt with every time you minimize the app. both solutions are half-baked at best.

it *was* perfect as it was. why did they remove it? why can't they add it back?

hope that clears up the issue even if you don't read through the thread.

Then tell Apple.

already did, several times, as have other users on this thread. that was recommended a while back. i think we are hoping that they pay attention to the requests that are accumulating here as well. the more feedback they receive the better. thanks.

Then that should be the end (as the TOU prohibits speculation) there is nowhere to go but wait.

For a Level 6 your posts here are redundent and rather snobbish. Now you may report me and close the thread.

Not worth the effort, thanks.

For anyone just joing this thread, if you miss this feature, please post here *AND* send your feedback directly to apple via: Mail > Provide Mail Feedback in Mail.app. Hopefully with enough feedback Apple will consider adding back this much loved and missed feature to future versions of mail. Thank You!

Just downgraded my mail features by upgrading to Mountain Lion with the rest of you. I've already sent feedback to Apple, but thought I'd add a comment here as well to keep the thread alive. Like most others, it baffles me that "upgrading" would eliminate certain key features that some of us have come to know, love, and, frankly, rely on. This is not one of the things I would expect to be the irritant that it is, but boy is it. I, too, have multiple email accounts I need to manage. Redesigned hits the nail on the head. The old way was gave us a "clean, elegant, informative indicator" that was not obtrusive and didn't block any usable window space. It also helped us to see at a glance if either a large email was clogging things up or if one of our email servers and/or internet connection was experiencing a problem so we could attend to it right away. I fail to understand what even prompted anyone to remove it as a default feature, let alone take it away completely.

Following Csound1's logic, we could do away with airplane flights across the Atlantic too because it could be crossed in ships and various types of boats. How many ways do we really need to get across?

We're not complaining for the sake of complaining. We really want to see this get fixed. I'm puzzled why it hasn't been already. It seems like it would be a pretty easy fix.

We're not complaining for the sake of complaining. We really want to see this get fixed.

Then why are you complaining here at all? We're all just users like yourself. We can't fix it.

I'm puzzled why it hasn't been already. It seems like it would be a pretty easy fix.

Maybe because its only the handful of people on this thread that find it problematic.

I'm new to posting here, but just wanted to say that this thread was very helpful even if Apple never sees a word of the postings.

It:

a) helped me to identify why we have been having this problem since upgrading

b) suggested avenues for requesting a fix to the problem

c) let me know that a number of other people had this problem and were also concerned about the issue

It seems that rather than berating other posters or coming to sweeping conclusions about how minimal the problem is, the posters who don't think this important should ignore this thread.