https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX928KC8jiA
Here’s a quick video tour of the new Mail client in OS X Lion. It’s got a three-pane view, nicely threaded “Conversations,” and a goes full screen. It’s very good. Mail alone is a good reason to upgrade to Lion.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
60 responses to “First Look: Lion’s New Mail Client Is So Good [Video]”
No video
it looks just like how microsoft did it with outlook
have you tried mobile me mail
Thanks, very nice & short tour through the new interface! I like the new look and UI design.
(PS: you should work on your unread messages count! ;) )
There’s a Huge difference, Mail.app is better for sure
Interesting and useful post
sorry man.. that threading thing looks like a copy of Sparrow… and so does the middle frame…
No video
One can buy a $2500 monitor with 12-bit color lookup tables and Mail’s toolbar uses like–what?–four colors? The icons are drab, clunky, and ugly, too. If the artsy, fartsy types like the retro greyscale theme that’s fine. But give the rest of us the option of “skins” with color so we can return to 2011.
Sparrow is the first of a new breed of mail clients… I hope. I just find it a bit too beta and lacking in basic features to warrant the current price. Copy or not, Mail will spur competition and attract the attention of other innovators. Time to fully move into the 21st century with evolving interfaces. Bring on the client wars… *laugh* Ok, so maybe it won’t ever come it that… but for a chunk of software we all use everyday, you’d think it would garner a little more attention! Browsers hog all the limelight!
Leander! It was pretty easy for me to see a good section of your email traffic merely by viewing full-screen mode on my iMac. Clearly you’re not worried by privacy/security….
@Andy you see anything i should be worried about? i don’t think there’s anything i need to hide.
@Michael — yeah, i get a LOT of email. in fact, it’s utterly broken. i was thinking of abandoning email altogether and moving to FaceBook. but who am i kidding? i live in email. i’m hoping this new client will fix things, even just a little bit.
@Leander. Frankly – yes. You’ve shown some of the financial services you subscribe to. You’ve listed your own personal email accounts & other identities linked to you. You’ve identified possible family members. All the folk you just ‘published’ in the received mail box window may not approve. Spammers, hackers etc will rejoice and possibly do some harm. Just saying.
sparrow is a copy of the iPad mail client to begin with though, and both use the column view that Apple invented, so it’s actually all Apple’s stuff and Sparrow is the derivative product.
I don’t like it because it takes much more desktop space then the present one and I hate all these fullscreen stuff making it impossible to see several things at the same time.
Thank you for the video…. question for you: does Mail 5 finally support being able to paste (in an email message) content from Excel 2008/2011 and retain formatting?
The more like the iPad’s mail app, the better I like it.
@Leander — Thanks for the preview. I’m excited by this update, as I was ready to give-up as well.
Q’s:
Can you turn off threading? Strange, but sometimes I’ve needed to turn it off in the past to find a particular email chronologically and associatively with my other emails. Which brings me to…
Search — how well does this work in Mail?
Its not enough for me toupgrade to Lion xD
@Gianfranco — yeah, it looks like it does preserve formatting. i just cut and paste a simple spreadsheet and it looked fine in the email.
@Jonathan – -yeah you can turn off threading. it’s under the View menu, just like the previous version.
Search is great, but takes a bit of getting used to. Instead of having buttons for “Subject,” “To,” “From” etc. the default is Entire Message. So it returns all the messages that contain your search term. The results are presented in the middle column. There’s a pull-down menu that you can then use to filter the results — subject, to, size, date sent, date received, etc. etc. And above that are a couple of buttions that allow you to restrict the search to a particular account.
@Andy — thanks for your concern, but it’s pretty unlikely that anyone’s going to pore through this video to find a couple of new addresses to spam. It’s a volume game: spammers buy adresses in the million. Besides, spam couldn’t get any worse… could it?
Those changes look nice, but have they fixed the bugs still present since Jaguar? Like:
-Mail taking servers and accounts offline by itself
-Multiple copies of the same message getting saved in Drafts
-The “New Email” chime not always reliably chiming?
ha that’s what i was thinking – man i would never show my inbox like that.
a copy of Sparrow ? You talk like you’re the copy of a stupid faggot. Think before you write.
I have a two screen (cinema displays) on my dev. computer and when going fullscreen in Lion, the given app fills up the left screen, which is intended, but blocks the right screen with a grey overlay?
Is there something I can do to maintain the right screen, so I can open one app as fullscreen on each?
I would like to see hd pictures of the main interfaces of mail, that would give us a better idea of the improvements.
And you talk like an original homophobic idiot
No video on ipad/iphone! Embedded flash? Is it April 1st?
You know, most people like the sleek, subtle, and monocolor theme that pervades Mac OS X. If you like bright lights and flashy colors, go to Windows 8.