MacOS Monterey Support

Apple Mail plug-in is disabled and cannot be enabled in Apple Mail V15.0. Is there a beta version coming providing support?

Welcome @gerryboucher

No, there isn’t a Monterey beta available at this time. And sorry, but no, I can’t give you any timeframe on when one would be.

Note: macOS Monterey is a ​beta ​operating system. Unless you are explicitly beta testing and reporting, you should not run a beta operating system on a device you need operating as expected. Just something to consider.

2 Likes

Thank you for your reply Jim.

I am a beta tester so it’s okay of some things don’t function as expected. You’ll be happy to hear everything is working fine except the Apple Mail plug in.

You’re welcome!
Glad to hear you are actively beta testing it. And thanks for the confirmation on DEVONthink’s general operation! Apple breaks mail plugins with every OS update. Hopefully it will be a simple adjustment to get it working again.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

I seem to remember that they are going to deprecate mail plugins completely with Monterey. But maybe I’m mixing things up.

I’m not totally sure of the specifics of that situation but they introduced a Mail plugin framework - MailKit. However, according to Development, the preview doesn’t look especially powerful.

My understanding is that they are only breaking things on Monterey, and will only be deprecating current format mail plugins in a future release.

SpamSieve came out with a beta version of their plugin supporting Monterey.

Well, hello on the forum. Before I get down to content, allow me to say that your post appears overly excited to me (that’s a kind of British English way of saying rude), especially coming from a first-time poster and on a forum in which manners appear to be held in pretty high regard. Potentially valid points become less prominent when they are overshadowed by unpleasantries, I feel. I would kindly ask you moderate your tone in future posts.

Re. the content itself: @BLUEFROG has provided support for donkey’s years - he will be well aware of who uses the product, and how they are - in general - best supported. He will not be surprised to hear of software engineers, I’m sure. He has - and will continue to - pointed out the risks of using beta operating systems to users in the past; whilst it is for him to explain why he does so if he wants, I am aware of a significant user base installing macOS and iOS betas at an early stage on “everyday” devices (rather than devices reserved for testing). I guess @BLUEFROG has the same experience.

You can rest assured that the team at DEVONtech will be using the developer previews to adapt their software to be ready and compatible with macOS Monterey at the time of release of that OS. To me you appear to be implying DEVONthink is poorly maintained - I could hardly agree less. DEVONtech run their own beta programs, fix bugs rapidly, respond to customer requests and so on. That the production version of their software is not compatible with a beta version of an OS to be published in - I’m guessing here - three months time is - in my opinion - simply not relevant to their wider user base. It is very much up to DEVONtech to decide the priorities of who is catered to, in which fashion.

I cannot comment on the specifics of the Mail Plugin; I’m not a software engineer - or even any other kind of engineer. My dealings with the team at DEVONtech suggest to me, however, that they will not simply change <= 11.0 to <= 12.0 but will actually test to see whether things work after having done so. And that is very much what I would like them to do.

DEVONtech listen to their users. If a significant number of developers post here that it is essential for them to be able to use the Mail plugin on current developer previews of macOS Monterey, maybe even providing a reasoned explanation as to why that is important (say, as opposed to berating DEVONtech and telling them how to do their jobs), that could well lead to the requisite steps being prioritised. Or not. What a fun and unpredictable world we all live in :wink: For the record, however: as a paying customer, what I am looking for is for DEVONthink to be fully compatible with macOS Monterey on day 1 - day 1 being the day that Apple publish that OS, and typically being the day I will put the OS on one of my devices for testing. In my environment I see no advantage in testing prior to that stage; I’m fully aware that the situation may and will be different for some others.

18 Likes

I appreciate your candor, though I think cultural differences may have been at play a small bit. I am from Bordeaux, and we tend to have a different view as to the correct…temperature?..of a conversation, as well as a different general approach to criticism. I am not berating the developers, I use their product, and enjoy it, though a fair amount of criticism is deserved if they are not taking advantage of offered opportunities to future-proof their applications à la developer previews. As concerns to the @BLUEFROG, perhaps I did not read the tone correctly, but his post seemed very much to be acting like a gros malin. If I am mistaken, the fault is mine.

1 Like

Je ne suis pas convaincu que c’est une question de differences culturelles … mais bien, etant allemand, qu’en sais-je. Nevertheless. Monterey is beta software. So vendors of other software can use it to adjust their product. Which does not mean, as much as you may not like this, that they actually update their product to work with the beta version of an OS, that being very much a moving target.

I actually do not know any company that does (YMMV, of course). Adobe is notorious for not having their stuff updated when a new macOS version is ready. And DT is a much smaller company, I presume. So give them some slack.
In the past, they’ve always followed up a new macOS release with a new version of DT that worked. Including an updated mail plug-in.

If someone decides to run a beta software for whatever purposes, it is their prerogative. But they cannot reasonably expect to have every other software vendor upgrade their product just so that they can run it flawlessly on their beta OS.

13 Likes

As a retired software design engineer on very large software projects I am aware that it is physically impossible to test all of the possible combinations of hardware and software and hardware environments that will be encountered once an app goes into release, even for a company like Apple or Microsoft, much less a much smaller developer such as Devon Technologies.

I run beta software for multiple reasons, including curiosity, but high on the list is helping developers by giving them a heads up when I encounter an issue. When I report an issue with a beta product, I do not expect the developer to stop all work to correct my issue, rather to make them aware of the issue so it can be put on the list of issues that will need to be addressed. From experience as a developer I also know that awareness of an issue can often present unexpected opportunities for an easy “fix” while working on another more critical issue or even unexpected solutions or even improvements.

The fact is most errors of this type are officially reported through Apple’s Feedback Assistant app that captures lots of data and information to aid the developer. I only come here to see

  1. if there is an awareness of the issue,
  2. if there is already a fix,
  3. if the problem is between the headsets
  4. or as in the case of one developer, their issue was so convoluted it took a variety of message back and forth to put bounds on it, and to work through a command line “fix”.
8 Likes

I was confused about needing the Apple Mail plug in and always installed it and had this issue with each macos update. I finally realized that my work flow did not require it since in my case, I don’t import all mail. As I process my inbox in Apple Mail, I hit a hot key to run the script that will import the current message into DT.

~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail/Add message(s) to DEVONthink.scpt
2 Likes

You have a very good point, if the fix wasn’t just changing a number in a property list file. And really, I wasn’t going to post asking for the fix, was more perturbed by the “it’s your fault for running a preview OS” attitude I interpreted being given to the OP (But again, I may have misread the tone of his post, and if that’s the case, I’m happy to admit I’m the ass :smiley:). I do think that users of a “Pro” application can have some reasonable expectation of support for professional use, my professional use being software development, and wanting to bring in some emails on my work MacBook, which is running Monterrey so I can test builds of our applications against it.

Either way, there are multiple sides that can be argued, and I am not arrogant enough to assume mine is the correct one.

Dear all!

Have there been any new developments on this? Having the mail plugin/extension would be very helpful also on Monterey.
Thanks for any updates on this.

The latest version (4.0.4) should actually work on Monterey (and does over here).

Still receive incompatible plug-in when starting mail.

Which version/build of Monterey do you use? And which version of the plug-in is installed?

12.0 Beta (21A5552a

And the version of the installed plug-in (see folder ~/Library/Mail/Bundles)?