Very trippy use of bold, to be honest. -Jim

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I voted for somewhat like it as there are improvements to the interface. However, there are also some bad regressions - the unread/read toolbar buttons are virtually indistinguishable on a quick glance whereas it was immediately obvious what the status was with the old versions. Get rid of the somewhat ugly button-style background from the icons and I would like it a lot more.

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PB G4, 1.5 GHz, 2x512MB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 80 GB 5400rpm HD, SuperDrive, MacOS X 10.3.9

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I had the drawer on the right side of my Mail window. I had gotten used to it being there. I liked the fact that I could change which side the drawer was on if I felt like it. Now I'm stuck with it on the left.

It also took me a while to get used to how Mail handled sigs.

I know I'll get used to having the mailboxes listed on the left, but it will take time.

Anyone know of a way to change the location of the mailboxes? Or should I just mess around with interface builder? (on a copy of course)

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Yeah the drawer and placing it on the right side is one of the things I miss most about mail. The new buttons don't bother at all. But I liked being able to open folder in a new viewer and then close the drawer to give me back screen real-estate. I found it especially useful when doing a bunch of cut and paste and drag and drop from an organized folder. Now, not only is the mail folder list now on the left, when you hide the folders the window shifts and grows by the amount of space occupied by the list.

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I like the new functions Mail.app now offers a lot. Like Smart Mailboxes, the substantially faster search, per account signatures and the Connection Doctor to name a few.

On the other hand I totally disagree with the new interface. It has lost a lot of things that were there before. Both in terms of useability and features. Just to mention, that it's totally against Apple's own Human Interface Guideline.

• The toolbar buttons are not distinguishable by their shape. This would help the eye and conform to Apple's HIG!
• Totally nonsense enforced grouping of toolbar buttons. Let's have them one by one like anywhere else.
• The Status bar is completely gone. I want it back, now.
• The choice of small toolbar buttons is gone. Mail.app is the only app to not offer this, why?
• The mailbox list cannot be moved to the right hand side anymore, where this was possible with the good old drawer.
• Spotlight search get's in the way of my workflow. I cannot preselect what I'm searching for, before typing in text into the search field. Before I could tell Mail to search in the "From", "To", "SUbject" or "Entire Contents" of one or all Mailboxes. I can still do this, but I have to type first, wait for the Spotlight bar to appear and then click what I'm searching for.
• The Junk filter will move away Messages from your InBox even in Training mode when it should just color mark them. When switching Junk Filter Mode from automatic back to training the "Junk Mailbox" is deleted without ANY warning, notice or even a way to get back it's contents. It's just gone, including all your false positives why you switched to training mode again.
• When moving from field to field in a "new message" window, including pop-ups, you cannot get to the text field for the message body if you have enabled te "priority" menu. You're stuck there, unless you click with the mouse.
• The "save to iPhoto" is only available from the Save… button pop-up in the message view. It's not in the context-menu of a picture, nor anywhere else in menus.
• The button for "new mailbox" doesn't change to "new smart mailbox" when the option (alt) key is pressed. This is unexpected, because every other app (eg. iTunes, iPhoto) does it that way.
• Organize by threads lacks a keyboard shortcut.

Conclusion:

Apple has added a lot of new stuff into Mail.app which is great. Overall it feels a lot faster and polished in terms of features. On the other hand the user interface is a terrible step backwards, taking away a lot of choice and information from the user, that was there before.

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Same here. I had the drawer on the right side. That way I kept just enough of the left side of the mail window exposed under my other open apps to see when new e-mails came in. I really hope Apple fixes this. I don't see why the folder list has to be on the left. I doubt that really fits with how most people probably use a mail client anyhow.

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Funny, most people seem to say the same thing: once I left-justified the toolbar I was happy. I had the same reaction.

I don't understand why people have had such a negative reaction to the new design. I think it's a lot better than the old one, which always looked pretty goofy to me. And don't get me started on the idiotic mail folder drawer--as if anybody would ever close it!

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I think Apple made nice UI changs to Mail.app, but they've really BRUISED one particular user experience:
when composing a new mail, I used to enter a "to" address, press the TAB key to enter a "subject" line, then press the TAB key to go to the body and start entering my message.

With Mail2, now you have to press TAB to cycle through a bunch of UI elements like account, prioroty, signature, digital signature. UGH! Why would I want to use they kayboard to make those selections!?? Those are meant to be clicked on by a mouse.

sigh...this is the type of UE I expect on Windows, not Mac OS X.

This is my one pet peeve with Mail2

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Sounds like you have full keyboard access turned on in Keyboard shortcuts of the Keyboard & Mouse Pref Pane. If you turn that off, tabbing works as expected. You can also hit control-F7 to turn it on and off.

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...i have two gripes.

1. as said in the ars-technica article it is BAD UI-design that the buttons don't differ in shape. now its harder to figure out, which button does what.

2. now we have 3 different interfaces: the pin-stripes (or whatever one should call it now), the metal-interface and the mail-interface.

please apple: give the buttons their shape back and chose ONE design for all programs.

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There are 6 not 3

http://www.robservatory.com/archives/2005/05/17/consistency-of-design/#more-3

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