Shift-Click Behavior in Leopard’s Mail.app

I just upgraded to from Tiger (10.4.10) to Leopard (10.5.5), and found the behavior of keyboard+click combinations in Mail.app to have changed, in quite an annoying manner. I used to use the following techniques in Tiger’s Mail.app to sort large volumes of mail, usually when marking as spam.

Scenario 1

Given a set of messages, 1…..2…..3…..4

Click a mail message (1), Shift-Click another (2) to highlight everything in between. Command-Click a new mail message (3), which is added to the selection set without altering the previous list. Up until this point, the behavior of Tiger and Leopard’s Mail.app is the same.

Shift-Click a message (4) further down the list.

In Tiger, this would have messages 1….2 selected, and messages 3…..4 selected. One could continue down the inbox message list like this, adding hundreds of messages to a selection, then perform an action (move to folder, mark as Junk, delete, etc).

In Leopard, this would have messages 3….4 selected, and not the previous selection. Bad.

Scenario 2

Given a set of messages, 1…..2…..3…..4

Click a mail message (2), Shift-Click another (3) to highlight everything in between. Shift-Click a new mail message outside the list, and in the opposite direction (1).

In Tiger, this would have messages 1….3 highlighted. A subsequent shift-click on message (4) would have messages 1….4 highlighted.

In Leopard, this would have messages 1….2 highlighted, and not the messages between 2…..3. A subsequent shift-click on message (4) would leave messages 2…..4 selected, and not the messages between 1…..2. Bad.

The behavior in Tiger’s Mail.app was brilliant, and radically contributed to speedily of adding items to a selection list. I want to revert to this behavior in Leopard’s Mail.app. It is reasonable that it might be a plist option. In general, however, I want this selection behavior available across all applications, including the Finder.