A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to actu­ally upgrad­ing to Leop­ard on my laptop. One of the things I was inter­ested in trying out once I got upgraded was Apple Mail’s new Note feature.

I fired up Mail and clicked on the note icon and…nothing hap­pened. Hmmm, check the Menu bar. Go to File → New Note…nothing again. Well okay, I thought to myself, some­things wrong here. Maybe I should do a Google search. Hmmm, what to search. Mail Notes Error. Umm, okay too generic, I’ll try being more spe­cific. Apple Mail error open­ing new note. Grrr. Try sev­eral other search strings. #@$%*! ¹

Okay, so it’s become clear to me at this point that Googling the prob­lem is just not going to work. I decide to fire up Con­sole to see if there are any enlight­en­ing error codes. Con­sole does at least offer me some­thing, in the form of “Mail[471] font-​family cannot be nil”.

Hmm, that looks like gib­ber­ish to me. I do some more unsuc­cess­ful Google searches. Finally, I decide to attempt to decode that error again. That error means that some­where a font family is not selected or unavail­able. We know it’s hap­pen­ing when a new note is being cre­ated. I opened up Mail again and started pur­su­ing the pref­er­ences. Low and behold, under the tab for Fonts & Colors, I found this:

The field for the Note font is com­pletely blank. I selected a font and attempted to open a new note. Success!

As it turned out, this hap­pened to be a very simple solu­tion for a very silly prob­lem. That solu­tion took me over an hour to figure out. Unfor­tu­nately, I’ve never been able to figure out why that field was blank in the first place. I wonder how many other people have had this exact same prob­lem and just given up on trying to figure it out.

1. Side Rant: What exactly was Apple think­ing when they named their email client “Mail.” Could they have thought of a worse name? It is impos­si­ble to search for infor­ma­tion about a prob­lem with the pro­gram because “mail” could refer to so many things. It’s kind of like buying a com­puter, that has the model name of “computer.” Then say said com­puter one day won’t start up. You find another com­puter and start doing a search for the prob­lem. Your query string is going to look some­thing like this: [brand name] com­puter won’t start. Com­pletely use­less.↩