As suspected. Seems like far too much trouble to deal with this. Hopefully Apple will fix it! I did originally write to my ISP and didn’t get a response on this one. May try again.
BTW I’ve tried several times to follow your suggestion to close my mailboxes window after resetting the columns, but they still reset to the narrow default when I switch mailboxes, even just between All Inboxes and All Sent. I guess I’ll get used to readjusting the columns a few times/day…
I stopped using All Inboxes (and All anything) for just that reason. As long as I select only individual mailboxes, Mail seems to retain my column widths.
Of course, my opinion is that Mail should remember each mailbox’s column widths—but it doesn’t.
Good to know. BTW does anyone know if there’s a way to get Mail to show the arrival time for messages that were received prior to the present day — like it always used to? Not having that makes it harder to find old messages.
Also I’m finding that Finder search in Sonoma only works when I choose ’This Mac.’ My searches come up blank when I point to a specific mailbox. Is there something I need to activate to get file indexing to work properly?
Not here. My account-specific mailboxes change column widths too.
I’m afraid I see the same behavior as you. In principle @Will_M’s procedure should work and I have seen it work myself. But then after a while Mail screws it up again for some to me non-obvious reason. Mail has been horrible with column widths for several years now. It’s frustrating. Shouldn’t be this hard to get that right, but I also know Finder has similar issues remembering window defaults and that has also been a long-standing issue.
Yes, I gave up worrying about column widths in the Finder a decade or more ago! You’d think it wouldn’t be that hard to get it right…
I just experienced the scrambled text while composing email in Mail issue. What seemed to fix it, if only for the moment, was to resize the email being composed. Resizing generated a text update for the window, and the updated text was displayed correctly. When continuing writing the email led to more scrambled text, generating an update again let me read what I wrote.
Mail also had at least one other issue. It lost the SMTP server it had used for years. I checked the list of servers for my several email accounts and discovered for others also the default server designation had been turned off. I turned them back on and mail seems to work as expected. At least for now.
You can try opening Terminal.app and typing sudo mdutil -E. When prompted, type your account password and, assuming your account has admin privileges, your Mac will reindex the Spotlight databases–including Mail’s. Might take a while depending on how much stuff’s on your Mac…
When I opened Terminal, I was first prompted to change the ‘default interactive shell’ to zsh. I went to the Support page on this and followed the directions to do that from the Users and Groups settings. Hope that was correct. I don’t really know what any of that means, but the Terminal instruction appeared to match what was described in the online instructions so I chose to follow it.
Then I did what you suggested. After typing my password (which only appeared one character at a time), I got a fresh Terminal prompt but no indication that anything was happening. Can I assume my Mac is reindexing?? Do I need to keep it from going to sleep for some interval of time?
thanks,
Brian.
zsh is fine; there’s plenty of online reference material, Google is your friend. MDUTIL will take a while to (silently) reindex your drive - but is user-friendly. If your machine sleeps it will (I believe) pick up where it left off until it finishes. No guarantee that it’ll fix all your search results issues but it certainly won’t hurt.
So no way to tell if it’s working? Does Terminal need to stay open? Thanks!
You can quit Terminal. The indexing process will finish and quit gracefully.
Used to be you could monitor indexing progress by clicking the Spotlight menubar icon and typing a character or two - but now the easiest way seems to be Activity Monitor; search for ‘mds.’ Good luck!
Don’t know if you saw that Apple has issued the macOS 14.3.1 update (along with 17.3.1 for iPhone and iPad - and a WatchOS update) all of which supposedly fix our beloved text bug.
I doubt they’ve given Apple Mail.app any love tho … 