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I've been using Macs for about 2 years now and have really enjoyed switching from a PC. In general it really feels like Apple gets it right the majority of the time.

But there seem to be these blind spots in some of their software that bother me to the point of finding and posting a question on an Apple-related question and answer site. Here are some things about Mac OS X that I don't understand, that I would really appreciate somebody shedding some light on:

1) DMG files: why is it that when I open a DMG, it opens a new finder window in the background? These are the things I struggle to explain to my mom: when she has a disk image and opens it, why doesn't it open that Finder window in the foreground? If you double click on it, clearly you want to access it immediately, no?

2) Mail.app: this is a biggie. I've upgraded to Lion, and for some reason Mail just won't mark some messages as Read. Isn't this one of the few things that a Mail app should be able to do? 1) Download email. 2) send email. 3) Mark email as read? About once a day, I need to manually right click on a conversation to mark it as read. Not a huge deal, but why wouldn't they fix this?

3) another Mail.app question: why the inline attachments? Why would I ever want a zip file embedded in the middle of the text of my email; I'm not crafting a web page with call-outs here, I want text, and attachments at the bottom.

In the grand scheme of things these are all very small compared to how much they consistently get right, even when I haven't realized what right is until I see it. But then these small things that seem consistently wrong; I don't understand it. Help me understand!

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Hi, welcome to Ask Different. Please read the FAQ's regaring the type of question that should be posted. We (the community) can only answer questions with facts and sources, so philisophical questions and answers shouldn't be here. If you would like answers to your questions you should post them seperatly, but without the why have they done x and replace with how can I avoid this. – Graeme Hutchison Jan 11 '12 at 16:29
I'll try Quora then, thanks. – Deep Sea Diving Jan 11 '12 at 16:30
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feel free to ask the questions here, just in line with the FAQ's – Graeme Hutchison Jan 11 '12 at 16:31
There is a Defaults terminal command for making mail stop putting attachments "in-line": "defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -boolean YES" – XAleXOwnZX Jan 11 '12 at 21:28
And also, you can set what is required to mark messages in conversation threads as "read." By default, a message in a conversation thread is marked "read" only when clicked on and highlighted. This setting can be changed in Mail Preferences in the "viewing tab" near the bottom where it says "mark all messages as read when opening a conversatioN" – XAleXOwnZX Jan 11 '12 at 21:31
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closed as not a real question by Nathan Greenstein♦ Jan 11 '12 at 16:58

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

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