Selecting multiple addresses in Mail
Mail adds a nice design touch to multiple address selection. Here’s a simple email message with three recipients: Jefferies, Lisa, and Stella.
Select Lisa and Jefferies, one after the other, and watch what happens:
|
Look at the To: field. |  |
|
Hover over Lisa. popup arrow appears background darkens |
 |
|
Select Lisa. popup arrow remains background goes dark text goes white |  |
| Hover over Jefferies. |  |
|
Select Jefferies too. popup arrow disappears |  |
The two addresses merge together, separated by a comma. Apple may have added this feature just so you could drag multiple addresses as one. Cool!
The current implementation includes a design flaw. Although Mail displays the selected addresses as a single visual element, it doesn’t treat them that way when you right-click on them. When you right-click on an individual address, a contextual menu appears featuring actions you can perform on that address, like Remove Address:
Right-clicking anywhere on the combined selected addresses should display a modified contextual menu with actions appropriate for the combined addresses, like Remove Selected Addresses. Instead, the same contextual menu appears, tailored for the particular selected address you happened to click on:
This violates the illusion that the selected addresses are now a single element, weakening the feature.
And there’s one curious aesthetic decision involving the comma used to separate the selected address names. As addresses are selected, they retain their original positions relative to their unselected state. This makes sense since it keeps the address names from jumping around as you select them. Apple inserts a comma between the names to separate them, which also makes sense:
But what makes less sense is that extra space before the comma. Maybe it was added for visual balance to help bridge that wide gap, or maybe it was a simple oversight. Either way, it looks a bit odd.