10.5: Problems with Mail's bouncing icon and the Dock

Apr 01, '09 07:30:04AM

Contributed by: noworryz

In Leopard, if you have "Automatically hide and show the Dock" checked in the Dock System Preferences panel, and mail arrives when the Dock is hidden, sometimes the Dock shows Mail's bouncing icon (bouncing out over the desktop from the edge of the screen) and sometimes it does not.

Right after login, if new mail arrives, the hidden Dock will show the bounce. If the user moves the mouse over the Dock when the Mail icon is bouncing, even without clicking, the hidden Dock will then stop showing Mail bounces. This new behavior continues until some other application is started or issues a background alert, bouncing its icon in the Dock.

Other applications do not seem to have this problem, so it appears to be an interaction between Mail and the Dock. It is particularly annoying when you have a Mail rule with an action to "Bounce icon in Dock," yet you cannot see the bounce. There are two workarounds:

  1. Avoid mousing over the Dock when the Mail icon is bouncing. Instead, go directly to Mail through some other means (e.g., leave Mail's Activity window open and click on that, or use Command-Tab) to read the new mail.
  2. Click on the Mail icon in the Dock to read your new mail, but then start some other application after you are finished.
Even worse, it seems that every type of Mail notification is broken. If a Mail rule has a "Play Sound" action, the sound will not be heard unless the System Preference Sound panel has the "Play user interface sound effects" option checked (as discussed deep in the comments to this previous hint.)

Of course, none of this matters to users who hate the icon bounce. For those of us that don't want to miss an email arrival, though, it's a problem.

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