Please help with reading Apple mail in Mavericks

By ray h, 29 October, 2013

Forum

macOS and Mac Apps

All, In the Mountain Lion version of OSX, reading mail was a breeze. In the messages column group, simply pressing VO-J jumped to the message content, saying jump to text, and you could read the text of the message with the cursor keys. To jup back to the message column pressing VO-J went back, as did pressing backspace to delete the message and jump to the message column group. Now , the behavior is totally different. When I press VO-J, as it did before it says "jump to text" but it doesn't work. Sometimes it says it is interacting with embedded items, but pushing cursor up or down simply reads the message list and not the text of the message. Any help? Anyone experiencing this?

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Hi. this is still working as

Hi. this is still working as expected for me. I didn't change any settings. I hope you can get this resolved.

classic layout

Hi. I don't remember where it is, I'll look tomorrow but somewhere in the iptions is the checkbox saying use clasic layout? I didn't have it checked. If yours is somehow try to uncheckit. Or perhaps just check then uncheck to se if thathelps. I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense. It'slate.

thanks much

Siobhan (and all others on this site) you are the best. It is in mail, preferences, view and then classic layout needs to be checked. Now works like a charm. Ray

I spoke too soon

While reading mail and jumping back and forth using VO-J after checking the "classic view," box under Mail, preferences, view; mail is still a disaster. I can't get the messages group column to read correctly, I can't jump back and forth with VO-J and many emails with attachments won't let me open or save the attachment. I have turned the "classic view" checkbox on and off and tried several other fixes. No luck. Any more thoughts? I'm finding this and a few other Mavericks "improvements" quite frustrating.

reading mail

I had to turn off classic view to get it to preview a few lines of mail but once I did that it worked better. I am having problems with the iMap interface and gmail so am thinking about doing pop mail again. I can open attachments if my vo cursor is on the part that says embedded. It will even work with command-y for quick look. Jim

Using mail without classic view checked

By unchecking the "classic view" under preferences-view, I can make mail much more useful. In this way, you interact with your mail list like any other table and using VO. It does, as Jim says, read the first few lines of the message; if you want to read more, press command-O and the message will open and you an interact with the text just as in any other application. Not nearly as good as jumping back and forth with VO-J as was the case in Mountain Lion. I am also having a struggle with attachments. While every email with an attachment shows up properly on my iPhone 4s (so I know the attachments are there) only about half of the emails in Apple Mail show the attachments and, even when I know an attachment is there, using the file menu the "save attachments" option is dimmed. Have others experienced this? Any solutions? As I use mail very heavily, I am currently disappointed with the Mavericks upgrade. Ray

Perhaps you need to contact

Perhaps you need to contact Apple accessibility about this. I'm currently on the fence about upgrading to Mavericks and your experiences with not being able to download attachments worried me a bit. It's not like I receive attachments all the time… But when I do I would certainly like the ability to retrieve them.