7 ms·

Apple mail “bug” turns out to be user script after all

181 points by sygma 13y ago

Tloewald 13y ago
Seems like the post tiptoes around the issue of having called out Apple for having awful bugs when in fact it was user error. Interesting post, but a little more forthrightness would have helped. Also the previous post hasn't been amended.
- richardwhiuk 13y ago
  It feels like fastmail.fm owe Apple an apology for calling out the client as bugged when it was doing exactly what the user asked it to.
  - 0x0 13y ago
    It's pretty obvious that Mail.app 7.0 is incredibly buggy, it's just a shame that they had to be called out on this particular case which wasn't their fault.
    - ams6110 13y ago
      Mail.app has been buggy since its NEXTSTEP days. Especially with multiple accounts. I have to admit I haven't tried it recently, the older versions were just too awful to forgive.
      - 0x0 13y ago
        To be fair, the osx 10.7.* and 10.8.* versions of Mail.app have been almost flawless for me.
      - gilgoomesh 13y ago
        But you're more than happy to accuse Apple of bugs you presume are still in Mail? You realize that exactly the type of reckless casual accusation that is to blame here. Anecdotally, I use Apple's Mail.app for 5 different accounts containing over 50 GB of email without problems. Last problems I remember having were importing from Leopard to Snow Leopard – since then it's been smooth sailing. Admittedly, I use POP, not IMAP, so I'm not prone to the sort of bugs in the article.
    - zw 13y ago
      Mail 7.0 is buggy for Gmail. Every other indication I've seen is that it is designed for and complements plain, real, compliant, standard IMAP perfectly fine, including Fastmail, to the extent where you can shoot yourself in the foot with it.
      - 0x0 13y ago
        I'm getting crazy random unread-mails badges on both dovecot imap servers and gmailimap...
        aroch 13y ago
        This happens to me in Thunderbird / Postbox on Win7 and OSX, leading me to believe it's some old edge-case IMAP bug
      - smackfu 13y ago
        And since Gmail is a very popular mail service, with a special account type in Mail, you would think it would be well tested.
        sbuk 13y ago
        Why? Shouldn't it be the case that Gmail uses standards?
        smackfu 13y ago
        Fundamentally, the problem is that the IMAP standard does not support the concept of tagging, just folders. And GMail supports tagging but not folders. GMail does a pretty good job of mapping tags to folders, but it ends up leaving edge cases that are hard to handle. Like how all emails will still be in the All Mail folder, even after you "move" them to another folder (tag). I'm not sure there is any real solution, other than making mail via IMAP read-only.
      - kbd 13y ago
        Mail is buggy with Exchange as well.
    - ketralnis 13y ago
      It really is, I've been fighting with it all day to get it to move mails from one folder to another. They reappear in the original folder immediately. It's driving me crazy.
      - speleding 13y ago
        I had this. For me enabling the "All Mail" folder in Google's IMAP setting fixed this after a lengthy resync.
        ketralnis 13y ago
        Unfortunately I've had that enabled the whole time :(
    - spotman 13y ago
      And its even funnier that cyrus-imapd (which is what fastmail.fm runs, and contributes heavily too) is what I think (please correct me if wrong) is what is shipped with OSX Server. So the one IMAP server that apple likely uses for their own things, was potentially well tested, and its the one company thats running it has called them out, and now has to bite their words. I use/run cyrus-imapd for years and have never had an issue with mail.app. But it is pretty frequent that I hear people with other imap providers (especially gmail) that have issues with it.
      - brongondwana 13y ago
        They switched to Dovecot a while back actually.
        spotman 13y ago
        Ah, interesting, did not realize that. Seeing people like yourself in the git stream made me think otherwise:)
  - smosher 13y ago
    I don't think so. With their track record it would take a devout optimist not to think "oh, Mail is bugging out again." At least that's my impression from maintaining dozens of servers with many thousands of customers running this client.
- brongondwana 13y ago
  I've amended the previous post now. The client is still the best place to detect something like this and block it. It has more information than the server. I will be putting work into detecting infinite loops on the server as well.
- nicholassmith 13y ago
  Agreed, especially as it seems the Apple Mail team were proactive in getting in touch and helping resolve the issue. A mea culpa would have been nice, we all occasionally leap to a wrong conclusion but if you've called someone out wrongly a quick 'we were wrong' goes a long way.
gibwell 13y ago
So all the vitriol about this issue was simply misplaced?
- tedunangst 13y ago
  Nope, that's not how it works. Some other issue will be found and used to retroactively justify the vitriol. It wasn't misplaced, just mistimed.
  - gibwell 13y ago
    So it was just nastiness waiting for a made up justification.
  - brongondwana 13y ago
    There have been plenty of other bugs that have caused issues with our system, hence the "jumping to conclusions". On the plus side, the client does appear to be getting better, and the team working on it really care about the quality of their work, so I have high hopes for OS X Mail!
auctiontheory 13y ago
After a few years as a product manager, I learned that the best response to a showstopper bug reported by a single user was to just sit on my hands.
- supercoder 13y ago
  and wait to become redundant ?
  - kevinpet 13y ago
    A real significant bug will be experienced by others. A single report suggests a problem with that user. Two reports suggests a dozen others who haven't bothered to report it.
    - philwelch 13y ago
      For sufficiently large values of n.
  - zorpner 13y ago
    At a previous company, we had a competitor who we were trying quite hard to beat to market with a particular feature, and it was (half-jokingly, and not by me) suggested that we send them false reports of subtle but deadly bugs to occupy their time. So.
    - evan_ 13y ago
      Someone is going to write a Medium post seriously suggesting this and HN will react as though it's genius...
- protomyth 13y ago
  Had a team lead follow that strategy once, bug was time and time zone related in testing. Nasty bug ignored in testing killed us in rollout. He made his schedule, I spent 3 days doing data cleanup for his team.
itafroma 13y ago
For context, here's the original blog post from Fastmail: http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/26/mac-os-10-9-infinity-times-your-spam/ http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/26/mac-os-10-9-infinity-time... And the Hacker News discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617154
coldcode 13y ago
Any significantly awful bug can usually be described as oh shit.
37prime 13y ago
Isn’t it a hip thing to blame Apple? To be honest, I did not see any posts regarding such issue in Apple Developer Forums during Mavericks Developer Preview phase. Large numbers of my email accounts are hosted through Gmail or Google Apps.
muteh 13y ago
"There is no need to read this unless you’re particularly interested in IMAP protocol issues and/or gossip." Wow, that's a funny way to spell sorry.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

181 points by sygma 13y ago

Seems like the post tiptoes around the issue of having called out Apple for having awful bugs when in fact it was user error. Interesting post, but a little more forthrightness would have helped. Also the previous post hasn't been amended.

richardwhiuk 13y ago
It feels like fastmail.fm owe Apple an apology for calling out the client as bugged when it was doing exactly what the user asked it to.
- 0x0 13y ago
  It's pretty obvious that Mail.app 7.0 is incredibly buggy, it's just a shame that they had to be called out on this particular case which wasn't their fault.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    Mail.app has been buggy since its NEXTSTEP days. Especially with multiple accounts. I have to admit I haven't tried it recently, the older versions were just too awful to forgive.
    - 0x0 13y ago
      To be fair, the osx 10.7.* and 10.8.* versions of Mail.app have been almost flawless for me.
    - gilgoomesh 13y ago
      But you're more than happy to accuse Apple of bugs you presume are still in Mail? You realize that exactly the type of reckless casual accusation that is to blame here. Anecdotally, I use Apple's Mail.app for 5 different accounts containing over 50 GB of email without problems. Last problems I remember having were importing from Leopard to Snow Leopard – since then it's been smooth sailing. Admittedly, I use POP, not IMAP, so I'm not prone to the sort of bugs in the article.
  - zw 13y ago
    Mail 7.0 is buggy for Gmail. Every other indication I've seen is that it is designed for and complements plain, real, compliant, standard IMAP perfectly fine, including Fastmail, to the extent where you can shoot yourself in the foot with it.
    - 0x0 13y ago
      I'm getting crazy random unread-mails badges on both dovecot imap servers and gmailimap...
      - aroch 13y ago
        This happens to me in Thunderbird / Postbox on Win7 and OSX, leading me to believe it's some old edge-case IMAP bug
    - smackfu 13y ago
      And since Gmail is a very popular mail service, with a special account type in Mail, you would think it would be well tested.
      - sbuk 13y ago
        Why? Shouldn't it be the case that Gmail uses standards?
        smackfu 13y ago
        Fundamentally, the problem is that the IMAP standard does not support the concept of tagging, just folders. And GMail supports tagging but not folders. GMail does a pretty good job of mapping tags to folders, but it ends up leaving edge cases that are hard to handle. Like how all emails will still be in the All Mail folder, even after you "move" them to another folder (tag). I'm not sure there is any real solution, other than making mail via IMAP read-only.
    - kbd 13y ago
      Mail is buggy with Exchange as well.
  - ketralnis 13y ago
    It really is, I've been fighting with it all day to get it to move mails from one folder to another. They reappear in the original folder immediately. It's driving me crazy.
    - speleding 13y ago
      I had this. For me enabling the "All Mail" folder in Google's IMAP setting fixed this after a lengthy resync.
      - ketralnis 13y ago
        Unfortunately I've had that enabled the whole time :(
  - spotman 13y ago
    And its even funnier that cyrus-imapd (which is what fastmail.fm runs, and contributes heavily too) is what I think (please correct me if wrong) is what is shipped with OSX Server. So the one IMAP server that apple likely uses for their own things, was potentially well tested, and its the one company thats running it has called them out, and now has to bite their words. I use/run cyrus-imapd for years and have never had an issue with mail.app. But it is pretty frequent that I hear people with other imap providers (especially gmail) that have issues with it.
    - brongondwana 13y ago
      They switched to Dovecot a while back actually.
      - spotman 13y ago
        Ah, interesting, did not realize that. Seeing people like yourself in the git stream made me think otherwise:)
- smosher 13y ago
  I don't think so. With their track record it would take a devout optimist not to think "oh, Mail is bugging out again." At least that's my impression from maintaining dozens of servers with many thousands of customers running this client.
brongondwana 13y ago
I've amended the previous post now. The client is still the best place to detect something like this and block it. It has more information than the server. I will be putting work into detecting infinite loops on the server as well.
nicholassmith 13y ago
Agreed, especially as it seems the Apple Mail team were proactive in getting in touch and helping resolve the issue. A mea culpa would have been nice, we all occasionally leap to a wrong conclusion but if you've called someone out wrongly a quick 'we were wrong' goes a long way.

gibwell 13y ago

So all the vitriol about this issue was simply misplaced?

tedunangst 13y ago
Nope, that's not how it works. Some other issue will be found and used to retroactively justify the vitriol. It wasn't misplaced, just mistimed.
- gibwell 13y ago
  So it was just nastiness waiting for a made up justification.
- brongondwana 13y ago
  There have been plenty of other bugs that have caused issues with our system, hence the "jumping to conclusions". On the plus side, the client does appear to be getting better, and the team working on it really care about the quality of their work, so I have high hopes for OS X Mail!

auctiontheory 13y ago

After a few years as a product manager, I learned that the best response to a showstopper bug reported by a single user was to just sit on my hands.

supercoder 13y ago
and wait to become redundant ?
- kevinpet 13y ago
  A real significant bug will be experienced by others. A single report suggests a problem with that user. Two reports suggests a dozen others who haven't bothered to report it.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    For sufficiently large values of n.
- zorpner 13y ago
  At a previous company, we had a competitor who we were trying quite hard to beat to market with a particular feature, and it was (half-jokingly, and not by me) suggested that we send them false reports of subtle but deadly bugs to occupy their time. So.
  - evan_ 13y ago
    Someone is going to write a Medium post seriously suggesting this and HN will react as though it's genius...
protomyth 13y ago
Had a team lead follow that strategy once, bug was time and time zone related in testing. Nasty bug ignored in testing killed us in rollout. He made his schedule, I spent 3 days doing data cleanup for his team.

itafroma 13y ago

For context, here's the original blog post from Fastmail: http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/26/mac-os-10-9-infinity-times-your-spam/ http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/26/mac-os-10-9-infinity-time... And the Hacker News discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617154

coldcode 13y ago

Any significantly awful bug can usually be described as oh shit.

37prime 13y ago

Isn’t it a hip thing to blame Apple? To be honest, I did not see any posts regarding such issue in Apple Developer Forums during Mavericks Developer Preview phase. Large numbers of my email accounts are hosted through Gmail or Google Apps.

muteh 13y ago

"There is no need to read this unless you’re particularly interested in IMAP protocol issues and/or gossip." Wow, that's a funny way to spell sorry.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]