11 ms·

Mac OS 10.9 – Infinity times your spam

177 points by brongondwana 13y ago

ss64 13y ago
Apple mail “bug” turns out to be user script after all October 29, 2013 http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/29/apple-mail-bug-turns-out-to-be-user-script-after-all/ http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/29/apple-mail-bug-turns-out-...
kyro 13y ago
I would very much appreciate an iOS 7 stripping of Mail.app. I've developed this aversion to opening up the app, and if I do by accident, it's a panicked scramble to quit. It's bloated and clunky. I would consistently get connection errors, it would randomly decide to re-sync all of my mail attachments, and more. I've been on Sparrow for a year or so now and have had zero problems. It's funny, across all of my Apple devices, I don't use any of the native mail apps for one reason or another. On iOS, I use Mailbox.
- tomphoolery 13y ago
  In Settings > Mail, Contacts & Calendars, there's a section called ACCOUNTS. Click on all of them and turn "Mail" off. This way you'll still get everything else in Calendars, Contacts, et. al., but when Mail.app opens it will be empty.
  - kyro 13y ago
    Good tip - thanks!
    - tomphoolery 13y ago
      Mailbox rules. :)
  - newman314 13y ago
    The problem is that most (all?) mail apps other than the default Mail app on iOS do not properly spawn when you are in another app and choose the Send as Email option. I use the Gmail app for most of my mail and Mail for work Exchange. I've caught myself multiple times inadvertently trying to send a funny article using work email. Ugh.
    - malandrew 13y ago
      This requirement that certain app functionalities may only be provided by Apple's own apps needs to be challenged in court via a class action suit so that they may be forced to unbundle these. These apps should be deletable and you should be able to programmatically assign their responsibilities to another application of your choosing. We've had this capability on the desktop forever. There is not pro-consumer argument Apple could make for denying a setting that lets you change this.
hboon 13y ago
Mail in Mavericks is bad. Since the previews, I have not been able to archive emails for Gmail accounts or Google Apps for Business. A subset of mails archived directly on Gmail will appear and stay in Mail's Inbox. I'm not sure where the developers for Mail went to that they didn't have the resources to fix it. Maybe to help with the iOS 7 crunch?
- robn_fastmail 13y ago
  Yeah, this one is well known, see https://tidbits.com/article/14219 https://tidbits.com/article/14219. We actually have some evidence to suggest that we've picked up a few customers leaving Gmail because of this problem. Which is nice, but now we have to deal with a different bug. Nobody is safe from Mail.app! ;)
- rsl7 13y ago
  In my head, Mail.app was written for Steve, who I imagine was a read-reply-delete kind of a guy, and not much else mattered.
  - hboon 13y ago
    If that were true, the reverse would have happened. Mail.app was behaving properly before Mavericks.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    Mail.app is an old NEXTSTEP app. It's probably one of the oldest apps on the platform, and it's always sucked. There was even a windows version for a while, which you could get if you bought NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework for Windows NT.
    - rsl7 13y ago
      Yes, I'm aware of this, which is why I said what I did.
fit2rule 13y ago
sigh I really miss the good ol' days of e-mail, before all these Web 2.0 people hit the scene with their "let us scan your mail for other addresses" this and their "we'll keep a safe copy of your email as a backup, using IMAP" that .. Frankly, though, I blame MS Outlook. When it hit the scene, email became a thorny mess of standards, almost-standards, and not-standard at all .. and it seems the rest of the industry is quite happy following that disastrous path to oblivion set out for us with the MS Outlook/Exchange competition.
- zorked 13y ago
  To be fair there was once a mess where e-mail was riddled with issues with charsets, bad MIME implementations, buggy QP-encoded headers and so on. Then there was the spam age. Then the no-client-actually-works age, which is where we are. I don't think email ever worked well.
  - fit2rule 13y ago
    I've got every email I ever sent since 1980. I think it worked pretty well during the 80's and 90's .. but the desire to have control over peoples' social trees, and the construction of such data structures by analysis of email archives, has sort of made a huge mess of it ..
- UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
  I honestly have no clue what you're getting at with your first paragraph. Email hasn't changed very much in the last fifteen or more years, so I'm not sure what changes the "Web 2.0 people" made you're referring to, your examples are pretty odd ("scan other addresses" what?). Also keeping a backup of deleted messages for a period of time is standard industry practice and has been since before I or Linux were even born. As far as MS Outlook and standards: That little rant reads like it was written about web-browsers and you just replaced "Internet Explorer" with "MS Outlook." MS Outlook uses a fairly standard implementation of IMAP/POP3/SMTP and has since forever. Microsoft have their own ActiveSync mechanism which isn't a standard, but no competing solutions have really appeared which compete with ActiveSync (and replace IMAP) so while you could blame them, you could also blame the complete lack of innovation in this space.
Ramattack 13y ago
I already have too a bug opened to apple due to an incorrect handle of uidl with 0 at left... I opened it like one year ago... Still no answer... This bug is in all ios apple mail clients....
- Ramattack 13y ago
  Well no answer.... They told me they knew the bug.... But it's still opened
  - heinz 13y ago
    Well.... Maybe it is because all of your sentences.... sound like awkward murmuring.... with all those extra periods.......
leephillips 13y ago
This is good news: it seems as if Apple's quality control is improving. After all, there is no report here of Mail.app actually deleting messages[0] [EDIT: oh, well] or sending out hundreds of copies of a message.[1] Despite this improvement, however, I think I shall continue to avoid this company's software in favor of more mature, open source solutions.[2] [0]http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12758081&tstart=0 [1]http://lee-phillips.org/iphoneUpgradeWarning-4-2-1/ [2]http://www.mutt.org/ (http://www.washington.edu/alpine/ might be OK, too.)
- recuter 13y ago
  [2] You've misspelled Alpine. :P
- 0x0 13y ago
  To me it seems like QA is declining. I just experienced data loss with the new Mail.app 7.0: Moving mails out of inbox to another folder left a copy in the inbox. Deleting the copy in the inbox also irrevocably deleted the other copy in the other folder. Smart mailboxes just don't work properly, doesn't auto-refresh, incorrect non-refreshing or just plain random "unread email count" badges, table column "Mailbox" shows "Archive" no matter which folder a mail actually belongs to, random 100% cpu usage for extended periods of time even when left idle, etc. etc. etc. The old version that shipped with 10.8.5 had none of these problem at all. Mail.app went from being perfect to being actively hostile :(
  - kbd 13y ago
    The QA failure most shocking to me lately is that on 10.8.5 on their newest MacBook Airs, Apple forgot some file necessary to use the video camera in 32 bit mode and therefore broke Skype. Microsoft, for all their faults, is notorious for having fantastic QA and not breaking old apps when they update Windows, and would never have let that happen. You'd think when you update the camera that you'd check such a popular app as Skype. Point is, it seems like the Mail team isn't the only place QA is lacking at Apple.
    - 13y ago
coldcode 13y ago
Email is always a bitch. Google's implementation of IMAP is a disaster as well. I have yet to find any email app on any platform that I can't swear at daily. I even tried to write my own before sanity returned.
- TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
  I haven't had any issues with thunderbird.
  - dhruvmittal 13y ago
    I find it's got some unpolished corners with regards to my university's exchange system. Not really sure why it does it, but it'll occasionally deliver me emails a few hours late.
  - keeperofdakeys 13y ago
    I have come across some interesting ones, like showing an empty forwarding email when the original email's to field was empty. That client must have done something very strange.
- leephillips 13y ago
  There are degrees: I doubt that Google's actually surprise-deletes users' email, for example. On the other hand, their SMTP servers have interesting issues[0]. "I have yet to find any email app on any platform that I can't swear at daily." I've been using mutt for many years and have not found a single bug or issue. It's fast, powerful, ridiculously configurable, and never surprises me. [0]http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/
  - quesera 13y ago
    Mutt sucks less. I've seen some bugs over the years, but very very few. I wouldn't use anything else. I run mutt on a distant server, so I wrote a simple attachment handler that can save or view attachments locally. Despite my wishes, the real world does occasionally send me photos. :)
apostlion 13y ago
Mail.app has these issues consistently, across versions. Which is a real shame, because UX-wise it is a really fine mail client. Also, threading algorithm changed slightly in Mavericks, leading to many more mistakes than ever before.
grn 13y ago
From the comments I draw the conclusion that a solid, open source, GUI e-mail client would have great popularity. Are there such clients out there? I used Thunderbird under Linux but it feels cumbersome.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  Opera Mail would be that one, but it's interface is not the best.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  I've searched in vain for an alternative, open or closed, to Mail.app on any platform ever since Mozilla lost its mind and released Thunderbird 3. I can't find anything fast, simple, stable, and maintained. The next best option I've found is, of all things, Outlook (Mac or Windows), not that it's particularly desirable, either.
  - clebio 13y ago
    I'm somewhat confused. Thunderbird on my computer is at version 24.0.1, are you referring to an ancient version, or a different numbering scheme?
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      Thunderbird 3.0 was released at the end of 2009. This was before Mozilla adopted a Chrome-like versioning strategy that led to rapid number inflation for both Thunderbird and Firefox. (1.0 was released in 2004; 2.0 was released in 2007; 3.0 was released in 2009; 3.1 in 2010; 5 (there was no 4) in 2011 commencing rapid versioning. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Thunderbird#Release_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Thunderbird#... ) 3.0 was a radical departure from and regression in speed, stability, and usability relative to the 1.x and 2.x series.
  - aidenn0 13y ago
    I've used claws in a pop environment; it beats the pants off of evolution as an e-mail client. I haven't tried its imap though. I stopped using thunderbird about 7 years ago when it deleted messages off of a Pop3 server before noticing that the disk with my mailbox on it was full, thus losing dozens of messages. People tell me it's better now, but I'm currently happy with claws. I've recently been trying trojita as my imap client (have been using mutt otherwis). It's fairly feature simple, but blazingly fast.
nknighthb 13y ago
Have you reproduced this problem yourselves? It sounds like you've seen it with exactly one user so far, whom you've not been able to contact. This strikes me as something that could just as easily be due to a pathological set of rules one user created.
- fredsted 13y ago
  Also lots of users, developers or not, have been using the betas recently. I'm no mail server expert, but I don't understand OP's conclusion, that ALL Mail.app clients are faulty.
  - gcr 13y ago
    The thing about this kind of problem is that even if it affects a small handful of users (say, a dozen out of millions), that's a dozen servers that the OP has to fix.
  - brongondwana 13y ago
    I mentioned a couple of other bugs in that same post that I _have_ been able to reproduce, and both the Mac users I've spoken to have also been able to reproduce when they set up new accounts. Not showing folders that exist on the server, that's super confusing. Checkboxes that don't work - well, that's a common preferences bug - auto-turning-back-on of settings. And not testing that you're copying to the folder that you've selected, that's a rookie mistake. Any software which makes changes to another machine over the internet should be checking that it's not causing an infinite loop.
cochese 13y ago
Great times insulting office software outside of the office. The end result of this article boils down to: who cares?
davidcollantes 13y ago
I find Mail.app to be OK now. The only think I am missing (and my main gripe) is strict threading. I just hate receiving my daily Google remainder (or lack thereof) and seeing the long list of previous emails with same subject associated on the same thread. Hate it! Does anyone knows if there is a way to get strict threading —without changing the client?
ricardobeat 13y ago
> I discovered my second attempt to contact the user about this problem in their Junk folder tonight. Peeking into a user's mail box? I know it's all plain text anyway, but this article makes me feel a bit uneasy.
- UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
  There's a difference between message contents and meta-data. Even the logs often contain the subject, folder, and TO/FROM frields. It is pretty hard to diagnose issues without at least gathering basic information on the state of an account. Not really sure I see the issue. If Google, for example, had an issue and they needed to examine the meta data surrounding individual pieces of my email I'd likely be alright with that as long as they didn't read the message's content/body or any attached files which I view as quite private.
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    The subject + from + to fields already expose a lot of information, and should be considered just as private as a message's content. I would expect it to be at least truncated in some way to prevent rough employees from accessing user accounts, still debuggable just as easily.
- Segmentation 13y ago
  He's referring to telemetry (logging). It's like an Apache log. Nothing to be uneasy about.
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    Server logs never expose identifiable information or any user-provided content.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      Email metadata and URLs are equally capable of having identifiable info and user-provided content.
lakwn 13y ago
I'm not an iOS user, but doesn't it sound a bit unprofessional for them to write such post on their main blog? Won't it piss off iOS users, who are not responsible for Apple's bad practices? I think such rants should indeed be made public, but maybe there was a better outlet for FastMail to do that.
- a-nom-a-ly 13y ago
  Out of curiosity, do you mind explaining why you think it's unprofessional? > Won't it piss off iOS users, who are not responsible for Apple's bad practices? In many(most?) services abuse of the service is met with suspension, etc. IMHO this case clearly counts as an abuse of the system regardless of whose fault it is.
- dmak 13y ago
  He was complaining about Mavericks Mail app, not iOS'.
Lagged2Death 13y ago
The 4 million message 32 bit limit of the UID field... Maybe I don't know how mail works, but shouldn't that be 4 billion? I imagine disk space would become an issue before a 32 bit identifier became an issue.
- blahedo 13y ago
  Yes, I noticed that too. I assume this was a brain fart on the part of the OP---2^32 is definitely 4 billion, not 4 million. (Well, approximately.)
  - brongondwana 13y ago
    Yeah, sorry - late night. The 2^32 limit is something we've never seen hit by real software. (we do have a testing account with top-bit UIDs and MODSEQs set to make sure nothing is trying to do signed maths with them)
    - Lagged2Death 13y ago
      Love your service, by the way.
lars 13y ago
I don't blame them. I had a go at implementing an IMAP server once, and it ranks as one of the most frustrating programming experiences I've ever had. The standard is huge, fragmented, and is full of strange requirements to fulfill every thinkable use case a client may have. These small details end up heavily dictating the architecture of your application. I don't see how could implement IMAP without completely throwing out most of your work several times. To make things worse, there is hardly any way to know when you've done it right. I'm not even sure there is a right way. When you start looking at how actual email clients speak IMAP, you'll see that they all manage to ask for a list of emails in completely different ways. It's a small wonder that these systems appear to work at all.
- cmyr 13y ago
  I think you can still blame them. They're a corporation with a 470B market cap, designing machines for which email is a primary use-case. They employ thousands and thousand of engineers. They should be able to build a mail client. Many much smaller organizations manage alright.
  - Segmentation 13y ago
    Agreed. How is Apple not to blame? If this article was about Gmail instead of Mail.app, every comment would definitely be blaming Google.
    - yapcguy 13y ago
      Yep. What real innovation has there been on Mac OS X since Bertrand Serlet left? Where are all the adult engineers? I've met a few people now who are contracted by Apple to work on their customer facing Apps. They commute to Cupertino from the Bay Area every day. Nice people but they're second tier. They never critique Apple, think Apple is the best at everything, and shrug their shoulders at any technology developed outside of Apple. There's always an excuse for things that don't work, from broken iCloud APIs to Apple Maps. They're competent engineers, they'll do what they are told, but they're not the mavericks who will break new ground. Just my opinion, but perhaps this is something other people have experienced. EDIT: To poster below, with regards to the Bay Area which covers a large geographic region, I'm talking about the San Francisco peninsula area. Amongst people I know, Cupertino (which is in Santa Clara) is generally referred to as being in South Bay rather than the Bay Area.
fennecfoxen 13y ago
Apple is the new Microsoft. Unfortunately Microsoft is still the old Microsoft.
matwood 13y ago
Is there another mail client for OSX that also supports gmail and s/mime? After the disaster that is the Mavericks Mail.app, I've started using Thunderbird. It can't be the only option out there.
- rsl7 13y ago
  I've been using PostBox for about two or three months. It's pretty nice, I especially like how it has attachments and image views in any folder, and dropbox integration. gmail works extremely well.
- dmak 13y ago
  I've been using Sparrow since I got my MBP, and I haven't found any better solution yet.
  - lobster_johnson 13y ago
    Sparrow is no longer being maintained, though. Personally I am pretty happy with the switch to Airmail [1], which has all the same features, at the expense of some minor, not very annoying bugs. [1] http://airmailapp.com/ http://airmailapp.com/
    - matwood 13y ago
      I looked at Airmail, but it doesn't support S/MIME yet.
dmbaggett 13y ago
If you're sick of the mail program that comes with your OS, try Inky (http://inky.com http://inky.com). It's still in beta, but we just put out a refreshed version that fixes a lot of issues users reported throughout 2013. Lots of polishing work still remains, but we're happily dog-fooding it and have a loyal following around the world. (And yes, Linux guys, we're still planning to release a version for Ubuntu -- finally.) Inky is a clean-sheet mail client implementation written with Python and Chrome Embedded Framework. It's taken us several years to get it to this beta stage; give it a try and let us know your thoughts at <hi@inky.com>. It's currently free; we'll likely offer upsell freemium versions at some point, once we're satisfied with it. Mail is hard.
- MAGZine 13y ago
  I've been looking for a replacement for Sparrow after it's gone unsupported. Will definitely check this out and pass along any relevant feedback.
- porker 13y ago
  You might want to rethink this text on your website: "Most mail clients only support the popular email providers." That's false FUD.
  - dmbaggett 13y ago
    :( That's primarily a reaction to the dozens of mail startups that layer on top of GMail instead of supporting IMAP, POP, and SMTP etc. But obviously there's something on that page to offend anyone who tries hard enough to be offended.
    - porker 13y ago
      When I think of "most mail clients" I think of Outlook, Thunderbird and so on - I wouldn't term something that didn't support at least one of POP or IMAP an email client. Proprietary email client maybe, like AOL's built-in one...
      - 13y ago
look_lookatme 13y ago
I've generally been happy with Mail.app in Mavericks until yesterday evening when I got a notification center pop-up for a new mail and accidentally clicked the delete option, instead of reply. The email completely and utterly disappeared from the client and the server (google apps imap), wasn't in any Trash or All Mail folder. It was gone completely based off an errant click on a pop-up notification. Kind of scary.
eknkc 13y ago
I think it's one user with a fucked up mailbox rule that copies stuff around or something like that. Apple also runs iCloud mail servers on IMAP, I think they would catch that if it was a widespread issue on betas.
- oleganza 13y ago
  I know at least 2 people plus myself who have the very same problem with Gmail IMAP and new Mail.app.
  - uxp 13y ago
    Gmail is a worse offender of the IMAP protocol than Apple Mail.app has ever been.
    - dirkgently 13y ago
      Thanks for providing compelling evidences that totally beat the ones provided in the original article.
mahyarm 13y ago
Someone suggested http://airmailapp.com/ http://airmailapp.com/ as a replacement email app for OSX in a recent HN thread and I've been very happy with it. Only downside so far is it doesn't have outlook contact integration, so you don't get autocomplete for all the email addresses in your company unlike microsoft outlook. Which is too bad, because airmail + apple calendar is much faster than microsoft outlook.
- eknkc 13y ago
  Airmail is really good. I have a couple of problems but the developers are really responsive and bugs are getting fixed pretty fast.
msie 13y ago
It sounds like IMAP is a stinking turd of a standard for servers. Is there an alternative in the works? Like IMAP lite?
RexRollman 13y ago
I've been reading about IMAP for more than a decade and I keep hearing about how hard it is to get right, for both the client and the server. I've wondered why this is. Is the standard too complicated? Is it written in way that allows for too much interpretation?
- grinich 13y ago
  This comment sums it up pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617692
  - RexRollman 13y ago
    Thank you. If that comment is true, than IMAP is a clusterfuck and I am surprised that there is no one working to create a better protocol.
    - grinich 13y ago
      Everyone agrees that it's terrible, or at least outdated and poorly spec'd, but IMAP is so entrenched that designing a new protocol would have zero impact. Users don't care about protocols-- they care about products. In order to create a new protocol/platform, you need to build an outstanding product. Apple is probably the best at doing this. The Facebook platform is another example, where awesome photo sharing led to the full social network, and later Open Graph. Microsoft actually made many improvements to a mail/calendar/task sync protocol with Exchange (seriously, go read the spec!) and they had adoption via Outlook, but they made the mistake of requiring licenses for development which kept it locked-down for years. This stuff is really tricky and just takes a while to happen. I think the email ecosystem is actually poised for a protocol shift, due to the easy distribution+upgrade path of App Stores and the web. But working with mail is a huge technical challenge-- just to start, a single user has more mail data than most startups' entire database. I've actually been working on a new email app for the last year, so I'm intimately familiar with the difficulties. :) You can sign up for our beta here: www.inboxapp.com
- jpallas 13y ago

177 points by brongondwana 13y ago

ss64 13y ago

Apple mail “bug” turns out to be user script after all October 29, 2013 http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/29/apple-mail-bug-turns-out-to-be-user-script-after-all/ http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/29/apple-mail-bug-turns-out-...

kyro 13y ago

I would very much appreciate an iOS 7 stripping of Mail.app. I've developed this aversion to opening up the app, and if I do by accident, it's a panicked scramble to quit. It's bloated and clunky. I would consistently get connection errors, it would randomly decide to re-sync all of my mail attachments, and more. I've been on Sparrow for a year or so now and have had zero problems. It's funny, across all of my Apple devices, I don't use any of the native mail apps for one reason or another. On iOS, I use Mailbox.

tomphoolery 13y ago
In Settings > Mail, Contacts & Calendars, there's a section called ACCOUNTS. Click on all of them and turn "Mail" off. This way you'll still get everything else in Calendars, Contacts, et. al., but when Mail.app opens it will be empty.
- kyro 13y ago
  Good tip - thanks!
  - tomphoolery 13y ago
    Mailbox rules. :)
- newman314 13y ago
  The problem is that most (all?) mail apps other than the default Mail app on iOS do not properly spawn when you are in another app and choose the Send as Email option. I use the Gmail app for most of my mail and Mail for work Exchange. I've caught myself multiple times inadvertently trying to send a funny article using work email. Ugh.
  - malandrew 13y ago
    This requirement that certain app functionalities may only be provided by Apple's own apps needs to be challenged in court via a class action suit so that they may be forced to unbundle these. These apps should be deletable and you should be able to programmatically assign their responsibilities to another application of your choosing. We've had this capability on the desktop forever. There is not pro-consumer argument Apple could make for denying a setting that lets you change this.

hboon 13y ago

Mail in Mavericks is bad. Since the previews, I have not been able to archive emails for Gmail accounts or Google Apps for Business. A subset of mails archived directly on Gmail will appear and stay in Mail's Inbox. I'm not sure where the developers for Mail went to that they didn't have the resources to fix it. Maybe to help with the iOS 7 crunch?

robn_fastmail 13y ago
Yeah, this one is well known, see https://tidbits.com/article/14219 https://tidbits.com/article/14219. We actually have some evidence to suggest that we've picked up a few customers leaving Gmail because of this problem. Which is nice, but now we have to deal with a different bug. Nobody is safe from Mail.app! ;)
rsl7 13y ago
In my head, Mail.app was written for Steve, who I imagine was a read-reply-delete kind of a guy, and not much else mattered.
- hboon 13y ago
  If that were true, the reverse would have happened. Mail.app was behaving properly before Mavericks.
- ams6110 13y ago
  Mail.app is an old NEXTSTEP app. It's probably one of the oldest apps on the platform, and it's always sucked. There was even a windows version for a while, which you could get if you bought NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework for Windows NT.
  - rsl7 13y ago
    Yes, I'm aware of this, which is why I said what I did.

fit2rule 13y ago

sigh I really miss the good ol' days of e-mail, before all these Web 2.0 people hit the scene with their "let us scan your mail for other addresses" this and their "we'll keep a safe copy of your email as a backup, using IMAP" that .. Frankly, though, I blame MS Outlook. When it hit the scene, email became a thorny mess of standards, almost-standards, and not-standard at all .. and it seems the rest of the industry is quite happy following that disastrous path to oblivion set out for us with the MS Outlook/Exchange competition.

zorked 13y ago
To be fair there was once a mess where e-mail was riddled with issues with charsets, bad MIME implementations, buggy QP-encoded headers and so on. Then there was the spam age. Then the no-client-actually-works age, which is where we are. I don't think email ever worked well.
- fit2rule 13y ago
  I've got every email I ever sent since 1980. I think it worked pretty well during the 80's and 90's .. but the desire to have control over peoples' social trees, and the construction of such data structures by analysis of email archives, has sort of made a huge mess of it ..
UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
I honestly have no clue what you're getting at with your first paragraph. Email hasn't changed very much in the last fifteen or more years, so I'm not sure what changes the "Web 2.0 people" made you're referring to, your examples are pretty odd ("scan other addresses" what?). Also keeping a backup of deleted messages for a period of time is standard industry practice and has been since before I or Linux were even born. As far as MS Outlook and standards: That little rant reads like it was written about web-browsers and you just replaced "Internet Explorer" with "MS Outlook." MS Outlook uses a fairly standard implementation of IMAP/POP3/SMTP and has since forever. Microsoft have their own ActiveSync mechanism which isn't a standard, but no competing solutions have really appeared which compete with ActiveSync (and replace IMAP) so while you could blame them, you could also blame the complete lack of innovation in this space.

Ramattack 13y ago

I already have too a bug opened to apple due to an incorrect handle of uidl with 0 at left... I opened it like one year ago... Still no answer... This bug is in all ios apple mail clients....

Ramattack 13y ago
Well no answer.... They told me they knew the bug.... But it's still opened
- heinz 13y ago
  Well.... Maybe it is because all of your sentences.... sound like awkward murmuring.... with all those extra periods.......

leephillips 13y ago

This is good news: it seems as if Apple's quality control is improving. After all, there is no report here of Mail.app actually deleting messages[0] [EDIT: oh, well] or sending out hundreds of copies of a message.[1] Despite this improvement, however, I think I shall continue to avoid this company's software in favor of more mature, open source solutions.[2] [0]http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12758081&tstart=0 [1]http://lee-phillips.org/iphoneUpgradeWarning-4-2-1/ [2]http://www.mutt.org/ (http://www.washington.edu/alpine/ might be OK, too.)

recuter 13y ago
[2] You've misspelled Alpine. :P
0x0 13y ago
To me it seems like QA is declining. I just experienced data loss with the new Mail.app 7.0: Moving mails out of inbox to another folder left a copy in the inbox. Deleting the copy in the inbox also irrevocably deleted the other copy in the other folder. Smart mailboxes just don't work properly, doesn't auto-refresh, incorrect non-refreshing or just plain random "unread email count" badges, table column "Mailbox" shows "Archive" no matter which folder a mail actually belongs to, random 100% cpu usage for extended periods of time even when left idle, etc. etc. etc. The old version that shipped with 10.8.5 had none of these problem at all. Mail.app went from being perfect to being actively hostile :(
- kbd 13y ago
  The QA failure most shocking to me lately is that on 10.8.5 on their newest MacBook Airs, Apple forgot some file necessary to use the video camera in 32 bit mode and therefore broke Skype. Microsoft, for all their faults, is notorious for having fantastic QA and not breaking old apps when they update Windows, and would never have let that happen. You'd think when you update the camera that you'd check such a popular app as Skype. Point is, it seems like the Mail team isn't the only place QA is lacking at Apple.
  - 13y ago

coldcode 13y ago

Email is always a bitch. Google's implementation of IMAP is a disaster as well. I have yet to find any email app on any platform that I can't swear at daily. I even tried to write my own before sanity returned.

TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
I haven't had any issues with thunderbird.
- dhruvmittal 13y ago
  I find it's got some unpolished corners with regards to my university's exchange system. Not really sure why it does it, but it'll occasionally deliver me emails a few hours late.
- keeperofdakeys 13y ago
  I have come across some interesting ones, like showing an empty forwarding email when the original email's to field was empty. That client must have done something very strange.
leephillips 13y ago
There are degrees: I doubt that Google's actually surprise-deletes users' email, for example. On the other hand, their SMTP servers have interesting issues[0]. "I have yet to find any email app on any platform that I can't swear at daily." I've been using mutt for many years and have not found a single bug or issue. It's fast, powerful, ridiculously configurable, and never surprises me. [0]http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/
- quesera 13y ago
  Mutt sucks less. I've seen some bugs over the years, but very very few. I wouldn't use anything else. I run mutt on a distant server, so I wrote a simple attachment handler that can save or view attachments locally. Despite my wishes, the real world does occasionally send me photos. :)

apostlion 13y ago

Mail.app has these issues consistently, across versions. Which is a real shame, because UX-wise it is a really fine mail client. Also, threading algorithm changed slightly in Mavericks, leading to many more mistakes than ever before.

grn 13y ago

From the comments I draw the conclusion that a solid, open source, GUI e-mail client would have great popularity. Are there such clients out there? I used Thunderbird under Linux but it feels cumbersome.

ricardobeat 13y ago
Opera Mail would be that one, but it's interface is not the best.
nknighthb 13y ago
I've searched in vain for an alternative, open or closed, to Mail.app on any platform ever since Mozilla lost its mind and released Thunderbird 3. I can't find anything fast, simple, stable, and maintained. The next best option I've found is, of all things, Outlook (Mac or Windows), not that it's particularly desirable, either.
- clebio 13y ago
  I'm somewhat confused. Thunderbird on my computer is at version 24.0.1, are you referring to an ancient version, or a different numbering scheme?
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    Thunderbird 3.0 was released at the end of 2009. This was before Mozilla adopted a Chrome-like versioning strategy that led to rapid number inflation for both Thunderbird and Firefox. (1.0 was released in 2004; 2.0 was released in 2007; 3.0 was released in 2009; 3.1 in 2010; 5 (there was no 4) in 2011 commencing rapid versioning. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Thunderbird#Release_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Thunderbird#... ) 3.0 was a radical departure from and regression in speed, stability, and usability relative to the 1.x and 2.x series.
- aidenn0 13y ago
  I've used claws in a pop environment; it beats the pants off of evolution as an e-mail client. I haven't tried its imap though. I stopped using thunderbird about 7 years ago when it deleted messages off of a Pop3 server before noticing that the disk with my mailbox on it was full, thus losing dozens of messages. People tell me it's better now, but I'm currently happy with claws. I've recently been trying trojita as my imap client (have been using mutt otherwis). It's fairly feature simple, but blazingly fast.

nknighthb 13y ago

Have you reproduced this problem yourselves? It sounds like you've seen it with exactly one user so far, whom you've not been able to contact. This strikes me as something that could just as easily be due to a pathological set of rules one user created.

fredsted 13y ago
Also lots of users, developers or not, have been using the betas recently. I'm no mail server expert, but I don't understand OP's conclusion, that ALL Mail.app clients are faulty.
- gcr 13y ago
  The thing about this kind of problem is that even if it affects a small handful of users (say, a dozen out of millions), that's a dozen servers that the OP has to fix.
- brongondwana 13y ago
  I mentioned a couple of other bugs in that same post that I _have_ been able to reproduce, and both the Mac users I've spoken to have also been able to reproduce when they set up new accounts. Not showing folders that exist on the server, that's super confusing. Checkboxes that don't work - well, that's a common preferences bug - auto-turning-back-on of settings. And not testing that you're copying to the folder that you've selected, that's a rookie mistake. Any software which makes changes to another machine over the internet should be checking that it's not causing an infinite loop.

cochese 13y ago

Great times insulting office software outside of the office. The end result of this article boils down to: who cares?

davidcollantes 13y ago

I find Mail.app to be OK now. The only think I am missing (and my main gripe) is strict threading. I just hate receiving my daily Google remainder (or lack thereof) and seeing the long list of previous emails with same subject associated on the same thread. Hate it! Does anyone knows if there is a way to get strict threading —without changing the client?

ricardobeat 13y ago

> I discovered my second attempt to contact the user about this problem in their Junk folder tonight. Peeking into a user's mail box? I know it's all plain text anyway, but this article makes me feel a bit uneasy.

UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
There's a difference between message contents and meta-data. Even the logs often contain the subject, folder, and TO/FROM frields. It is pretty hard to diagnose issues without at least gathering basic information on the state of an account. Not really sure I see the issue. If Google, for example, had an issue and they needed to examine the meta data surrounding individual pieces of my email I'd likely be alright with that as long as they didn't read the message's content/body or any attached files which I view as quite private.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  The subject + from + to fields already expose a lot of information, and should be considered just as private as a message's content. I would expect it to be at least truncated in some way to prevent rough employees from accessing user accounts, still debuggable just as easily.
Segmentation 13y ago
He's referring to telemetry (logging). It's like an Apache log. Nothing to be uneasy about.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  Server logs never expose identifiable information or any user-provided content.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    Email metadata and URLs are equally capable of having identifiable info and user-provided content.

lakwn 13y ago

I'm not an iOS user, but doesn't it sound a bit unprofessional for them to write such post on their main blog? Won't it piss off iOS users, who are not responsible for Apple's bad practices? I think such rants should indeed be made public, but maybe there was a better outlet for FastMail to do that.

a-nom-a-ly 13y ago
Out of curiosity, do you mind explaining why you think it's unprofessional? > Won't it piss off iOS users, who are not responsible for Apple's bad practices? In many(most?) services abuse of the service is met with suspension, etc. IMHO this case clearly counts as an abuse of the system regardless of whose fault it is.
dmak 13y ago
He was complaining about Mavericks Mail app, not iOS'.

Lagged2Death 13y ago

The 4 million message 32 bit limit of the UID field... Maybe I don't know how mail works, but shouldn't that be 4 billion? I imagine disk space would become an issue before a 32 bit identifier became an issue.

blahedo 13y ago
Yes, I noticed that too. I assume this was a brain fart on the part of the OP---2^32 is definitely 4 billion, not 4 million. (Well, approximately.)
- brongondwana 13y ago
  Yeah, sorry - late night. The 2^32 limit is something we've never seen hit by real software. (we do have a testing account with top-bit UIDs and MODSEQs set to make sure nothing is trying to do signed maths with them)
  - Lagged2Death 13y ago
    Love your service, by the way.

lars 13y ago

I don't blame them. I had a go at implementing an IMAP server once, and it ranks as one of the most frustrating programming experiences I've ever had. The standard is huge, fragmented, and is full of strange requirements to fulfill every thinkable use case a client may have. These small details end up heavily dictating the architecture of your application. I don't see how could implement IMAP without completely throwing out most of your work several times. To make things worse, there is hardly any way to know when you've done it right. I'm not even sure there is a right way. When you start looking at how actual email clients speak IMAP, you'll see that they all manage to ask for a list of emails in completely different ways. It's a small wonder that these systems appear to work at all.

cmyr 13y ago
I think you can still blame them. They're a corporation with a 470B market cap, designing machines for which email is a primary use-case. They employ thousands and thousand of engineers. They should be able to build a mail client. Many much smaller organizations manage alright.
- Segmentation 13y ago
  Agreed. How is Apple not to blame? If this article was about Gmail instead of Mail.app, every comment would definitely be blaming Google.
  - yapcguy 13y ago
    Yep. What real innovation has there been on Mac OS X since Bertrand Serlet left? Where are all the adult engineers? I've met a few people now who are contracted by Apple to work on their customer facing Apps. They commute to Cupertino from the Bay Area every day. Nice people but they're second tier. They never critique Apple, think Apple is the best at everything, and shrug their shoulders at any technology developed outside of Apple. There's always an excuse for things that don't work, from broken iCloud APIs to Apple Maps. They're competent engineers, they'll do what they are told, but they're not the mavericks who will break new ground. Just my opinion, but perhaps this is something other people have experienced. EDIT: To poster below, with regards to the Bay Area which covers a large geographic region, I'm talking about the San Francisco peninsula area. Amongst people I know, Cupertino (which is in Santa Clara) is generally referred to as being in South Bay rather than the Bay Area.

fennecfoxen 13y ago

Apple is the new Microsoft. Unfortunately Microsoft is still the old Microsoft.

matwood 13y ago

Is there another mail client for OSX that also supports gmail and s/mime? After the disaster that is the Mavericks Mail.app, I've started using Thunderbird. It can't be the only option out there.

rsl7 13y ago
I've been using PostBox for about two or three months. It's pretty nice, I especially like how it has attachments and image views in any folder, and dropbox integration. gmail works extremely well.
dmak 13y ago
I've been using Sparrow since I got my MBP, and I haven't found any better solution yet.
- lobster_johnson 13y ago
  Sparrow is no longer being maintained, though. Personally I am pretty happy with the switch to Airmail [1], which has all the same features, at the expense of some minor, not very annoying bugs. [1] http://airmailapp.com/ http://airmailapp.com/
  - matwood 13y ago
    I looked at Airmail, but it doesn't support S/MIME yet.

dmbaggett 13y ago

If you're sick of the mail program that comes with your OS, try Inky (http://inky.com http://inky.com). It's still in beta, but we just put out a refreshed version that fixes a lot of issues users reported throughout 2013. Lots of polishing work still remains, but we're happily dog-fooding it and have a loyal following around the world. (And yes, Linux guys, we're still planning to release a version for Ubuntu -- finally.) Inky is a clean-sheet mail client implementation written with Python and Chrome Embedded Framework. It's taken us several years to get it to this beta stage; give it a try and let us know your thoughts at <hi@inky.com>. It's currently free; we'll likely offer upsell freemium versions at some point, once we're satisfied with it. Mail is hard.

MAGZine 13y ago
I've been looking for a replacement for Sparrow after it's gone unsupported. Will definitely check this out and pass along any relevant feedback.
porker 13y ago
You might want to rethink this text on your website: "Most mail clients only support the popular email providers." That's false FUD.
- dmbaggett 13y ago
  :( That's primarily a reaction to the dozens of mail startups that layer on top of GMail instead of supporting IMAP, POP, and SMTP etc. But obviously there's something on that page to offend anyone who tries hard enough to be offended.
  - porker 13y ago
    When I think of "most mail clients" I think of Outlook, Thunderbird and so on - I wouldn't term something that didn't support at least one of POP or IMAP an email client. Proprietary email client maybe, like AOL's built-in one...
    - 13y ago

look_lookatme 13y ago

I've generally been happy with Mail.app in Mavericks until yesterday evening when I got a notification center pop-up for a new mail and accidentally clicked the delete option, instead of reply. The email completely and utterly disappeared from the client and the server (google apps imap), wasn't in any Trash or All Mail folder. It was gone completely based off an errant click on a pop-up notification. Kind of scary.

eknkc 13y ago

I think it's one user with a fucked up mailbox rule that copies stuff around or something like that. Apple also runs iCloud mail servers on IMAP, I think they would catch that if it was a widespread issue on betas.

oleganza 13y ago
I know at least 2 people plus myself who have the very same problem with Gmail IMAP and new Mail.app.
- uxp 13y ago
  Gmail is a worse offender of the IMAP protocol than Apple Mail.app has ever been.
  - dirkgently 13y ago
    Thanks for providing compelling evidences that totally beat the ones provided in the original article.

mahyarm 13y ago

Someone suggested http://airmailapp.com/ http://airmailapp.com/ as a replacement email app for OSX in a recent HN thread and I've been very happy with it. Only downside so far is it doesn't have outlook contact integration, so you don't get autocomplete for all the email addresses in your company unlike microsoft outlook. Which is too bad, because airmail + apple calendar is much faster than microsoft outlook.

eknkc 13y ago
Airmail is really good. I have a couple of problems but the developers are really responsive and bugs are getting fixed pretty fast.

msie 13y ago

It sounds like IMAP is a stinking turd of a standard for servers. Is there an alternative in the works? Like IMAP lite?

RexRollman 13y ago

I've been reading about IMAP for more than a decade and I keep hearing about how hard it is to get right, for both the client and the server. I've wondered why this is. Is the standard too complicated? Is it written in way that allows for too much interpretation?

grinich 13y ago
This comment sums it up pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617692
- RexRollman 13y ago
  Thank you. If that comment is true, than IMAP is a clusterfuck and I am surprised that there is no one working to create a better protocol.
  - grinich 13y ago
    Everyone agrees that it's terrible, or at least outdated and poorly spec'd, but IMAP is so entrenched that designing a new protocol would have zero impact. Users don't care about protocols-- they care about products. In order to create a new protocol/platform, you need to build an outstanding product. Apple is probably the best at doing this. The Facebook platform is another example, where awesome photo sharing led to the full social network, and later Open Graph. Microsoft actually made many improvements to a mail/calendar/task sync protocol with Exchange (seriously, go read the spec!) and they had adoption via Outlook, but they made the mistake of requiring licenses for development which kept it locked-down for years. This stuff is really tricky and just takes a while to happen. I think the email ecosystem is actually poised for a protocol shift, due to the easy distribution+upgrade path of App Stores and the web. But working with mail is a huge technical challenge-- just to start, a single user has more mail data than most startups' entire database. I've actually been working on a new email app for the last year, so I'm intimately familiar with the difficulties. :) You can sign up for our beta here: www.inboxapp.com
jpallas 13y ago