Following on from my adventures in dealing with spam messages, it’s quite strange that Mail.app doesn’t have an option to always show the from address domain in the mailbox list. It took opening the message, plus an additional click to confirm whether a “spam summary” email I received this morning was a phishing attempt (it was). I rather not open those mail messages at all1, if I can help it, and seeing the domain — which should be enough, given that it’s usually some junk domain like “funnybone dot com” — could allow me to dispose of these messages using the context menu.

Everyone knows that email is no longer a trust-by-default communication medium, so it strikes me as odd that these basic facilities are not available in MacOS’s default mail client. Seems like it’s barely change at all in recent years. Oh no, that’s not true: it now gives AI mail summaries that are totally useless. A feature like this would be much easier to add, and be much more useful to me.

  1. This is mainly because Mail.app also doesn’t have an option to avoid loading images across the board, or unless it’s a trusted domain. It does this automatically if the message end up in the Junk folder, but given that these phishing attempts made it into the Inbox, my trust in this feature is pretty low. ↩︎