I posted several weeks ago that I was trying to find a repeatable way to have mail incorrectly resize its columns, but that I couldn’t: They would be fine and set up exactly as I like them, and then sometime later I’d notice that they were all different sizes, but I couldn’t remember what I did to mess them up. Well, a posting here pointed me in the right direction!

Set up your mail columns just right… then do a search using the search box. Search the “Entire Message”. This will cause mail to put a ranking/relevance column in the view. Then clear your search and go back to the regular view - the mail columns will all be incorrect widths! Hallelujah! (For finding out how to reproduce this). Doh! (For it being such an annoying bug - and some flavor of this has been around as long as mail has). I logged 4261794 on this issue.

If nothing else, this reinforces the importance of tagging Report-A-Bug-Friday posts with “applebugfriday” on del.icio.us - you can browse other RABF postings and not only find ways to reproduce annoying bugs, but also get tips for logging better, more descriptive bugs with Apple.