6 ms·

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, i

by 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.
- objclxt 13y ago
  I don't think it's any more buggy than Microsoft's own mac desktop implementation (Outlook). I tried using Outlook with a work exchange account on my Mac, and ended up switching to Mail. Mail was, in my opinion, marginally better (...although still buggy).
- nsxwolf 13y ago
  I have a very large inbox (40,000+ messages) and it just behaves weird. It will get new messages about once a day, then mysteriously freeze up and spend the rest of the day, according to the connection doctor, re-syncing random old messages.
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    I get this too but on a few k emails - definitely less than 10k.
- brown9-2 13y ago
  and unfortunately, always has been.
tptacek 13y ago
Not only is Mail 7 incredibly buggy for me, to the point where I had to use a hex editor on the index file to get it not to crash within 15 seconds of starting up with a mail spool that worked fine with previous mail, but it's buggy with POP; I don't even use IMAP. My message counters are effectively random, my smart mailboxes no longer work, to the point where adding a new smart mailbox changes the behavior of preexisting smart mailboxes, it seems to have lost 1/200 of my existing messages, it can't move mail from folder to folder because of those dangling references, so I can't even break my inbox into smaller exportable folders, which would be handy because Mail 7 gets 2/3rds of the way through reindexing my inbox before crashing now. Junk mail randomly shows up in every folder. It's like running pre-1.0 Ximian Evolution from back in 2000, all over again.
- xenophanes 13y ago
  And they basically removed support for plain text email. I haven't hit any major bugs, but my friend did. But they removed the "view different encoding" thing from the menu, or whatever it was called. Before you could switch how you view multi-format emails, and set plain text as default using a terminal command. I'm really sad to see that gone.
  - acdha 13y ago
    > And they basically removed support for plain text email. You can still compose and view plain text email - the only change is that it doesn't display the plain-text alternative when someone sent HTML. Given that they support both, this makes sense from a usability perspective and makes "removed support" read as hyperbole.
    - xenophanes 13y ago
      How do you compose plain text in reply to someone who sent both?
      - acdha 13y ago
        Hit reply. Choose “Make Plain Text” from the format menu or Shift-Command-T.
brongondwana 13y ago
I have a user with a new folder called 'INBOX.inbox.Folder Name They Have Used For Years'. It was created by OS X Mail version 7 on Monday. It's not out of the woods yet! This user now can't see any of their other folders when they try to set up an account with OS X Mail because it breaks on the INBOX.inbox. I suspect again somebody was doing something clever with rules, and it's broken exactly BECAUSE OS X Mail has gotten better at server side namespace detection, and a folder name was saved as "inbox.foo" in the rule, but the INBOX prefix has now been implicitly added where it wasn't before. I might be writing a third blog post in the near future I think!
lostlogin 13y ago
There is an interesting post on this. I have to restart mail every 20 mins if I want full email functionality. I forward several email addresses to a gmail account as a way of backing up email. It seems to be (not 100% sure) this arrangement that makes all accounts go offline regularly, or at least say they are. Strangely I can still send all, and receive some email. I keep meaning to knuckle down and fix it once and for all, but I dislike email so much that I can't bring myself to invest time in it. So I keep wasting time. http://tidbits.com/article/14219 http://tidbits.com/article/14219
Groxx 13y ago
It has generally worked quite well for me (better than most), but its performance cratered a while back, somewhere around 300k messages I think. I haven't found a way to bring it back, so I've switched to Postbox (a Thunderbird wrapper, since Thunderbird's UI is atrocious)

by zw 13y ago

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.

objclxt 13y ago
I don't think it's any more buggy than Microsoft's own mac desktop implementation (Outlook). I tried using Outlook with a work exchange account on my Mac, and ended up switching to Mail. Mail was, in my opinion, marginally better (...although still buggy).
nsxwolf 13y ago
I have a very large inbox (40,000+ messages) and it just behaves weird. It will get new messages about once a day, then mysteriously freeze up and spend the rest of the day, according to the connection doctor, re-syncing random old messages.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  I get this too but on a few k emails - definitely less than 10k.
brown9-2 13y ago
and unfortunately, always has been.

tptacek 13y ago

Not only is Mail 7 incredibly buggy for me, to the point where I had to use a hex editor on the index file to get it not to crash within 15 seconds of starting up with a mail spool that worked fine with previous mail, but it's buggy with POP; I don't even use IMAP. My message counters are effectively random, my smart mailboxes no longer work, to the point where adding a new smart mailbox changes the behavior of preexisting smart mailboxes, it seems to have lost 1/200 of my existing messages, it can't move mail from folder to folder because of those dangling references, so I can't even break my inbox into smaller exportable folders, which would be handy because Mail 7 gets 2/3rds of the way through reindexing my inbox before crashing now. Junk mail randomly shows up in every folder. It's like running pre-1.0 Ximian Evolution from back in 2000, all over again.

xenophanes 13y ago
And they basically removed support for plain text email. I haven't hit any major bugs, but my friend did. But they removed the "view different encoding" thing from the menu, or whatever it was called. Before you could switch how you view multi-format emails, and set plain text as default using a terminal command. I'm really sad to see that gone.
- acdha 13y ago
  > And they basically removed support for plain text email. You can still compose and view plain text email - the only change is that it doesn't display the plain-text alternative when someone sent HTML. Given that they support both, this makes sense from a usability perspective and makes "removed support" read as hyperbole.
  - xenophanes 13y ago
    How do you compose plain text in reply to someone who sent both?
    - acdha 13y ago
      Hit reply. Choose “Make Plain Text” from the format menu or Shift-Command-T.

brongondwana 13y ago

I have a user with a new folder called 'INBOX.inbox.Folder Name They Have Used For Years'. It was created by OS X Mail version 7 on Monday. It's not out of the woods yet! This user now can't see any of their other folders when they try to set up an account with OS X Mail because it breaks on the INBOX.inbox. I suspect again somebody was doing something clever with rules, and it's broken exactly BECAUSE OS X Mail has gotten better at server side namespace detection, and a folder name was saved as "inbox.foo" in the rule, but the INBOX prefix has now been implicitly added where it wasn't before. I might be writing a third blog post in the near future I think!

lostlogin 13y ago

There is an interesting post on this. I have to restart mail every 20 mins if I want full email functionality. I forward several email addresses to a gmail account as a way of backing up email. It seems to be (not 100% sure) this arrangement that makes all accounts go offline regularly, or at least say they are. Strangely I can still send all, and receive some email. I keep meaning to knuckle down and fix it once and for all, but I dislike email so much that I can't bring myself to invest time in it. So I keep wasting time. http://tidbits.com/article/14219 http://tidbits.com/article/14219

Groxx 13y ago

It has generally worked quite well for me (better than most), but its performance cratered a while back, somewhere around 300k messages I think. I haven't found a way to bring it back, so I've switched to Postbox (a Thunderbird wrapper, since Thunderbird's UI is atrocious)