Remember the disclaimer I wrote in the first entry of this logbook? Given that very little of Mail is shown in Apple’s Big Sur preview page, I’ll have to be careful about what I can share here. Also, keep in mind that I have practically never opened Mail in the brief time I used the 13-inch retina MacBook Pro under Catalina before installing the Big Sur betas, so I may make an observation about something that looks or feels new to me in Big Sur, while perhaps it was already present in Catalina. Sorry about that in advance.
Main interface
Here’s the default interface as it appears after setting up an account. I haven’t touched anything. At first glance, I don’t dislike the general look. At least the icons in the toolbar don’t seem to share the same excess of padding between them as we saw in the menu bar and Finder windows.
Still, see that [»] icon in the toolbar? It means that there are more buttons that aren’t currently visible. This, in turn, means that when you open Mail on a 13-inch MacBook Pro, the default toolbar is not even visible in its entirety. I may be wrong, but this didn’t happen in the past.
Now, I know it’s nothing major, but it’s still indicative of the fact that Big Sur’s UI seems conceived and optimised for bigger screens.
By the way, I’m not sure where I had read it or who had said it, but back in June rumour had it that this default layout in Mail would have also been the only layout. Meaning that if you, like me, had always loved Mail’s classic layout, you would have been in for a sad surprise.
Well, in case you had heard the same rumour, rejoice, because the classic layout isn’t going anywhere. If you select View → Use Column Layout, you get the familiar interface:
And in case you were wondering: yes, you can manually adjust column width again.
With the classic layout, there’s just enough space between the toolbar icons to reveal what was missing in the previous layout. Let’s focus on this part of the toolbar for a moment:
- I find this icon misleading. At first, I’ll admit, I had no clue as to its function. When I hover over it with the mouse, the tooltip says Mute selected conversations or Unmute selected conversations according to the button’s state. Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s YouTube’s influence, but I tend to associate the icon of a bell with the concept of ‘notification’ — oh wait, Apple does it too in Big Sur: in System Preferences, the icon for the Notification pane is a bell. Without that tooltip, I wouldn’t have surmised it had something to do with muting/unmuting conversations. It also makes no sense that this button is clickable even when you’re not viewing your emails organised by conversations.
- This is an amazing UI trap: it looks like a text field. For a split second you may even think it’s the Search text field, since the Search icon is right nearby. But no, it’s a button. Why in Big Sur’s Mail this button has been given such an enlarged, prominent shape is beyond me. It’s the only toolbar button shaped like this. If you look at High Sierra, for example, you’ll see that Move is just a regular button with the same size as the others:
The whole layout of this button bugs me for some reason. The presence of that thin frame strongly suggests this is a clickable text field. The Move to… label beside the folder icon also suggests (based on other similar clickable text fields we’ve seen elsewhere) that the Move to… text will disappear and you’ll be able to type something in its place. You know, like a Search field. You’re led to believe so because, if you look at the toolbar again, even in “Icon Only” view, the text Move to… remains visible. Instead, it really behaves like an app’s menu command and looks like this when selected:
Also, note the terrible alignment of the drop-down menu with respect to the ‘Move to…’ button
Icon Only / Icon and Text views
Same behaviour as what we saw in Finder windows, and same mild annoyances: when you go from “Icon Only” to “Icon and Text” view, icons become really small; something that didn’t really happen before Big Sur. In Mail under High Sierra, when selecting “Icon and Text” view, the buttons maintain their height and actually get slightly wider, while in “Icon Only” view, they’re more compact overall.
Also, since Big Sur features less chrome in the title area of application windows, when you switch to an “Icon and Text” view, both in Finder windows and in Mail’s main window, that area looks terribly busy and crowded. As I’ve previously pointed out, toolbars in Big Sur seem to be really decent-looking only in “Icon Only” view. That’s not great, usability-wise.
Another toolbar — the Preferences pane
Here’s another detail I do hope it’s just temporary and that it will be fixed in a future beta. When you invoke Mail’s Preferences you get this pane:
Have you noticed, there in the top right corner? That’s right, there’s the [»] icon again, meaning that there are more options available, and that they’re currently hidden because the window is not wide enough. Clicking on it, you have the missing tab — Rules:
Well, that’s a bit unsightly, I thought, Let me resize the pane so that all tabs are visible.
But you can’t. The Preference pane’s dimensions are fixed. I hope someone at Apple notices, otherwise the Rules tab will definitely end up feeling lonely.
Anything good?
Yes. This is just a first look, and I’ve only set up a Gmail account, so I still don’t know how Mail in Big Sur behaves under heavy load, but so far the application’s performance is satisfactory. Mail feels very responsive and stable. After verifying my Gmail credentials, Mail started downloading all 15,000+ messages in the account, and it did so rather quickly, all things considered.
I don’t know if this behaviour is new in Big Sur, or if it’s something that was already introduced in Mojave or Catalina, but I noticed that, after downloading several hundred messages, Mail put the download on hold, detecting that the MacBook Pro was on battery power. I noticed this in the status bar in the bottom left:
It’s still too early to talk about reliability or possible data loss bugs (as many experienced under Catalina). I’ve been running Mail with this sole Gmail account for only 36 hours. So far, everything is working well. I’ll certainly update the logbook further down the road in case something happens with Mail and to add any further UI-related observations. I’m still exploring the application.