I’ve blogged about how Apple has really ramped it up against Microsoft Office with iWork ‘08. That is, they’ve ramped up against Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. But what about Outlook/Entourage? Well, Apple also has its return weapon for Entourage, which is the combination of Mail, Address Book, and iCal, and in Leopard, Apple has added even more to these three applications to increase the competition. But are these enhancements worth their weight in gold? Well, Address Book hasn’t seen any significant new features, so I’ll ignore it this go-around. iCal’s Feature Presentation will happen later this month, which means today’s focus is on Mail.

Leopard’s Mail does get some standard rejuvenating with some nice new features. Mail gets itself a new sidebar, based on the same iTunes-style source lists that can be found elsewhere in Leopard and iLife ‘08. Mail also benefits from a smarter Spotlight (full review coming later this month), allows you to archive your mailbox, and finally gives you the ability to forward an e-mail as an attachment if you want, instead of in-line. Mail also includes “simple mail setup” which can automate the setup for what Apple claims is 30 leading email providers. Indeed, it only took my e-mail address and password to setup a Gmail POP account completely automatically (although Mail is currently unaware of Gmail’s IMAP feature). Mail also includes additional Rich Formatting options, such as bulleted and numbered lists, indentations and background colors. While it certainly benefits from the increased formatting options, I would campaign for there to be a Contextual Format Bar in the Compose window (like from iWork ‘08).

The “significant feature” that got headlines from Apple is Stationery. I don’t know why Apple has gotten so compelled recently to get into the templates business between iPhoto, iWeb, iWork, iDVD, and now Mail, but they seem to like doing it. Mail comes with about 32 stationery templates that work just like in any of the above applications. You drag in your photos via the conveniently added new Photo Browser (which connects to your iPhoto and Photo Booth photos), and then replace the placeholder text with your own, and then Mail sends it as an industry-standard HTML e-mail that is supposed to open on any platform. The thing is that the default stationery is kind of limited in scope and not very specialized for special occasions, like, say, um, the holidays. Which are coming up, by the way. The Stationery browser also seems kind of limited in size and flexibility compared to Apple’s other template-browsing offerings (I’m surprised Apple didn’t let you browse through stationery with Cover Flow!!!). Also, the majority of people that I’ve talked to say that they wouldn’t really want to receive cute stationery in their e-mail, preferring to reserve e-mail for more productive pursuits. I can’t say I blame them, and quite frankly, I would rather send an iCard. Of course, that doesn’t mean that websites will probably spring up soon featuring downloadable Leopard stationery for anyone to add to their Mail collection.

A new feature for managing your e-mail that seems a bit more, um, useful is called Data Detectors. Although the technology behind it is not new and actually reminds me a bit of Stikkit, this is a technology that identifies and recognizes contact names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, dates, times, you name it, and can let you perform actions on those. Suppose you mouse over an address, well, an arrow pops up next to it. Click on it, and you are presented with a menu which can let you create a new contact with the address, or add the address to the existing contact, or do other things like show a map of the address, etc. Have a date or time? You can immediately add a new event to iCal with that information, which is autofilled for you into iCal. Data Detectors are really smart, and if you remember to use them, can really help automate some tasks that you commonly associate with receiving e-mail.

However, Leopard’s Mail goes farther than just being an e-mail client, but hopes to be a central location for all of the information in your life. Apple adds two features called Notes and To-Dos, which are intended for all of those people who want to remind themselves of something by e-mailing it to themselves. While I have only e-mailed stuff to myself occasionally, I am very much a kind of person that tells people to e-mail things to me because e-mail is where I’ll see them and remember them.

Notes stand out separate from regular e-mail, not only because they’re from yourself, but because Mail gives them yellow, lined paper as a backdrop, and uses the Marker Felt font by default (although this can be changed), even in the mailbox listing. While these Notes are useful, they aren’t very mobile. While you can sync them to other Macs if you have an ultra-expensive .Mac account, you strangely aren’t able to sync notes with the iPhone (and who knows why the iPod touch doesn’t even let you take notes), the notes seem to be Mail-specific (unlike To-Dos which have a systemwide service), etc. If you have an IMAP e-mail connection, then Apple claims that those notes will appear everywhere else that the IMAP connects. But how many places give you IMAP e-mail? Yahoo! appears to only offer IMAP when it comes to accessing it on your iPhone. Gmail only recently started IMAP, and given the problems that I had with it, I’d be surprised to find out if it would work or not. Oh yeah! That waste-of-$100-per-year service .Mac has IMAP! D’oh! The other thing is that in addition to the separate Notes mailbox that Mail gives you, all notes show up in your inbox. But what if you just want your notes to show up in the Notes box, separate from your inbox? Too bad, they’ve got to be in both places. You could move a note out of your inbox into a regular mailbox, but quite frankly, the Notes box that you see under the “REMINDERS” heading is really just a smart mailbox designed for displaying all of your notes. Also odd is that, despite having both the Notes function here in Mail and a Stickies widget in Dashboard, Apple STILL has the Stickies application in Leopard, one of the few applications that still remains from the pre-OS X days.

In Leopard, Apple has created a systemwide service for to-dos. The two chief applications that take advantage of these are Mail and iCal, but any application should be able to take advantage of them, and if you change your to-dos in one app, all other apps taking advantage of to-dos will immediately update. Mail provides a to-dos “mailbox” which is really more of a list of to-dos where you can edit the title, set a due date, an alarm, a priority, select the iCal calendar to associate it with, and (of course), check off the to-do when it has been to-done. However, one of the promos with this offering in Mail has been that you can select any string of text from within Mail, click the To Do button, and Mail will instantly create a new to-do from that string and associate the to-do with the message or note that you selected it from. From there, anytime, you can then check the to-do off as to-done, or click the arrow next to it to pop-up a box of options that you can set. What I find strange is why there isn’t an option anywhere, not even in the Services menu, to let you create a to-do this easily from any other Mac OS X application. It seems like it could be easy enough to do, but no, this quick-to-do feature is only for within Mail. Also, again, why can’t to-dos sync with the iPhone or iPod touch? Although I don’t have an iPhone or iPod touch, I still recognize that in my life, most to-dos are for things that I do while away from the computer, and I need to have my to-dos with me, which is why I still do the 20th century habit of writing my to-dos down on paper. I think that there should be a way for to-dos, like notes, to sync with the iPhone and iPod touch and also be editable on those devices as well.

In Tiger, Apple hailed the promise of Safari RSS, the first real web browser integration of a full-fledged RSS reader. Well, not really, because Firefox actually beat Safari in the RSS market by introducing its live bookmarks, and along with it, the feed icon standard. (By the way, Apple remains one of the very few remaining folks who have yet to adopt this feed icon, which is now a universally recognized standard for identifying subscribable RSS newsfeeds.) However, it quickly became apparent that Safari’s (and Firefox’s) only real blessing was to view a “trimmed down” version of a website if you wanted to, and if you wanted a real RSS experience, you needed a real RSS feed reader like NetNewsWire (or my favorite, NewsFire), or else an online feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader.

Leopard’s Mail finally takes Apple’s RSS newsfeed a step further by including RSS built-in. From within either Safari or Mail, you can specify your default feed reader, and then any RSS feeds that you open will be displayed in your chosen manner. Mail can automatically import any feeds that you’ve bookmarked in Safari, and feeds that you view in Safari will be automatically marked as read in Mail, and vice-versa. However, although Mail’s implementation of RSS makes more sense than in Safari, Mail’s RSS features are still very basic compared to other feed readers. Mail adds any feeds that you subscribe to to a “RSS” section of the sidebar, and feeds show up in an e-mail inbox type format. If there are multiple posts per day, these posts are organized into a single Mail thread. Mail does give you the option of either keeping the feed posts just within the feed itself or showing them in the inbox, but strangely enough, if you choose to not show them in the inbox, then Mail adds an up arrow icon next to the feed’s name in the source list, and if you click this button, it will reverse your original decision and show the results from that feed in the inbox, and there’s no way to undo that change! That really seems very counter-intuitive and something that I would expect from the likes of Microsoft. Another issue is that you cannot set Mail to automatically check feeds any more frequent than 30 minutes. Huh? That’s a great way to keep on top of what’s going on in the world! And I can’t seem to find a way to manually tell Mail to update its feeds–maybe that would have been a better use of the rollover button in the sidebar instead of a “Show in Inbox” up arrow! In short, the addition of RSS news feeds to Mail is a step in the right direction, but it’s so basic and so crippled that anyone who’s already been using their own feed reader solution is unlikely to change and hop on board to Mail.

Apple has made a large number of significant changes in Mail for Leopard, which attempt to make the application not as much as an e-mail application, but as an application for managing the frequently changing information in your life, similar to Microsoft’s Outlook/Entourage applications. Although the additions to set Mail in this direction are generally good ideas–stationery, notes, to-dos, RSS newsfeeds, etc.–they really feel like first-generation initial implementations that still have a long way to go before they will fully realize their purpose. But in the more specific realm of just e-mail, Mac OS X Mail still provides the best interface on the Mac, and probably any computer platform, for sending, receiving, and managing e-mail.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: Address Book, calendars, data detectors, e-mail, Entourage, features, HTML, iCal, iPhone, iPod touch, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, Mail, managers, newsfeeds, notes, Outlook, productivity, review, RSS, Safari, stationery, Stikkit, sync, templates, to-dos