Mac OS 10.9 – Infinity times your spam | Hacker News Reader

Mac OS 10.9 – Infinity times your spam

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177 pointsbrongondwana161 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I haven't had any issues with thunderbird.

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.

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.

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/

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. :)

I wrote one of these too, but eventually I decided it was simpler just to run mutt on the local machine.

"the real world does occasionally send me photos."

Dealing with the real world, while using mutt, is made easier with muttils: http://lee-phillips.org/muttheaven/

So THAT's what happens when I try to reply to ticketing systems with a mail+address-extension@example.com and it just keeps bouncing or creating new unlinked tickets :(

GMail's IMAP server actually works well... it just violates the spec in several obnoxious ways.

For Inky (http://inky.com) we had to devote a bunch of Gimap-specific effort into explicitly syncing flags, for example, because Gimap simply doesn't notify clients of flag changes. Inky has to poll Gimap for flag changes rather than passively learning about them via IMAP IDLE.

And the treatment of labels as folders is a mess for IMAP clients, as is the All Mail folder, which -- if not handled properly -- effectively generates a duplicate of every message in every folder.

But Gimap does work reliably in our experience. It's a bit slow, but it's less broken than IMAP servers run by other major providers (who shall remain nameless).

Is there any way to use Inky without it syncing all of my account passwords to the cloud? It looks awesome, but I just can't do that.

No. But it's important to realize that we don't actually store any of your mail in the cloud. You're not really syncing to anywhere but the Inky instance on your device.

I may checkout inky.

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.

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.

Good tip - thanks!

Mailbox rules. :)

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.

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.

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.

I know at least 2 people plus myself who have the very same problem with Gmail IMAP and new Mail.app.

Gmail is a worse offender of the IMAP protocol than Apple Mail.app has ever been.

Thanks for providing compelling evidences that totally beat the ones provided in the original article.

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?

Yeah, this one is well known, see 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! ;)

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.

If that were true, the reverse would have happened. Mail.app was behaving properly before Mavericks.

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.

Yes, I'm aware of this, which is why I said what I did.

> 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.

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.

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.

He's referring to telemetry (logging). It's like an Apache log. Nothing to be uneasy about.

Server logs never expose identifiable information or any user-provided content.

Email metadata and URLs are equally capable of having identifiable info and user-provided content.

I fully expect if my mail client is acting up, they'll turn on debug logs which have enough information to troubleshoot anything. The information he 'peeked' at was incidental to debug mode.

You can be pretty sure that your emails (regardless of where it's stored, MS, Yahoo, Google or your ISP) can be read by the operations/support team at any time.

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&amp;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.)

[2] You've misspelled Alpine. :P

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 :(

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.

> 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.

Windows 8.1 has had a number of severe problems.[1][2][3]

[1] http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2013/10/21/win-rt-81-pulle...

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2013/10/17/windows-8-...

[3] Anecdotally, a coworker tried upgrading on two separate devices (after Microsoft pulled 8.1 for awhile and then made it available again). On both it installed fine but disabled all of his Metro apps from starting.

Relevant: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

See the parts about backwards compatibility. I'll grant that Microsoft isn't as fanatical about backwards compatibility as they used to be.

The Steve Job's Wrath Engine has been removed. QA folks at Apple can now live normal lives.

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.

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.)

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)

Love your service, by the way.

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?

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?

This comment sums it up pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617692

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.

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

You can't understand the IMAP spec until you have been personally berated by Mark Crispin. Unfortunately, Mark has passed away, so the number of people who understand the spec is only going to decrease.

Haha so true, RIP.

Thankfully his responses are saved for posterity in the imap-protocol discussion list archive. ;)

https://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/mmsearch/imap-prot...

Someone suggested 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.

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

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.

If you're sick of the mail program that comes with your OS, try Inky (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.

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.

You might want to rethink this text on your website: "Most mail clients only support the popular email providers."

That's false FUD.

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.

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...

So your differing point of view means it's OK to malign us publicly? By "FUD" you surely meant to imply that we were trying to do something malicious, when, literally, all we're trying to do is make people's inboxes ever-so-slightly happier places.

To be clear:

- this is a really hard problem

- we're iterating in public to get user feedback

- we're not charging anything and don't have any immediate plans to

- we specifically ask for feedback via <hi@inky.com>

I'm not sure which aspect of this gave you the impression that our objective is to foist -- as you put it -- "false FUD" on poor unsuspecting consumers.

Sorry to bitch, but snarky comments are the main reason HN -- once my absolute favorite place on the web -- is turning into a useless cesspool.

See you on Quora, where the discourse is still reasonably civil.

Inky looks pretty cool, but I had the same reaction as porker when I read that part. I don't think he's trying to malign you, it's just a pretty blatantly false statement amongst a sea of neat-looking stuff.

>> "Most mail clients only support the popular email providers."

This is simply false, as most mail clients really do support IMAP/POP. The statement caught my eye too. No need to get all huffy about someone pointing this out.

Those are potential customers you are yelling at. Really smart early adopters with influence. And a very large number of people are watching. Whether they are right or wrong, we are all watching for how you handle the situation.

Between this and an avoided answer to whether you keep passwords in the cloud you've lost one potential customer.

We know it makes some uncomfortable to have the credentials in the cloud, but we felt it was important to make it as easy as possible for people to be able to use any device (we're working on iOS and Android) to access all of their email accounts. Of course it's up to you to decide if you trust us, but we've went to great lengths to make sure your emails don't pass through our servers and to keep your credentials secure. We explain our security precautions on our FAQ, which we'll continue to enhance going forward.

I didn't avoid the question on security; I pointed everyone to FAQ that specifically answers that question. And I didn't yell at anyone. But if someone spits in your face, you're allowed to wipe the spit off, aren't you?

But sure, take your ball and go home.

dmbaggett, I apologise that you have taken my message this way, and it's true I have been influenced by the all-too-common tone on this site; but I stand by my original comment that this is a line to spread FUD, like any company who tries to make out that their product is so different to the competition. You have unique features I'm sure, a unique take on email - don't rubbish your competition by spreading what is demonstrably not true for most email clients.

So you did mean to imply were were doing something malicious. Got it. For the record: we were not.

Your outburst just lost me as a potential user. If you don't want public feedback don't promote your "email client" on a public website. If you prefer the login-wall circle jerk of Quora, keep your promotions there.

Done! And your refund check is in the mail.

> So your differing point of view means it's OK to malign us publicly?

You publicly "malign" your competition in a way that several people in this thread feel is nearly libelous, then get huffy when someone calls you on it. I agree with his view: the conventional (i.e., in the average person's mind) "mail client" supports _any_ conventional "email provider" by definition.

I understand where you were coming from, but the statement itself was too broad, and now your reaction is digging a deeper hole. If a little blunt, I believe the original observation was meant as "feedback" that you claim to want. Nobody was talking about boycotting or ragequitting for a better forum, until you got defensive and refused to respond in a way that doesn't end in a personal insult against the commenter, or a general sneer at the community in general.

I should have added GMail to my list of 'mail clients' - they will check external accounts too. Forgot I'd been using that for a few years!

Then say "startup mail clients" not "most mail clients". I know if I surveyed your typical business persons and had them list out "popular mail clients", you'd almost never hear the "mail startups" you're referring to. I think there may be a bit of echo chamber going on, as if your only customers would be the HN crowd.

I get what you're saying, but regular people have no idea what the difference is between a mail client, GMail, and something like Mailbox. It's just "the thing I use read my email". That was the thinking behind the statement in the first place: we let you check mail in all your accounts, unlike most alternatives consumers use.

Do you consider yourself a good replacement for Windows Live Mail client (formerly known as outlook express)?

Yes, particularly now that outlook.com supports IMAP.

Inky is an excellent client. I tried+reviewed the first version released on HN about a year(?) ago and it was quite solid and well-engineered. If I weren't already happy with my notmuch/emacs setup, I would switch close to immediately.

Look neat. Is GPG support in plan?

EDIT: also why a .pkg with password requirement instead of a simple .app ?

GPG: certainly encrypted mail is on the list

.pkg: it's so we can clean up prior installs; maybe not a permanent thing

Couple of things that bug me:

1) I have to log in to your service. Why? Makes me think you're storing my mail credentials on your server. If it's a cloud sync issue, use Dropbox/iCloud.

2) Doesn't use my Contacts in To: field. This makes it a non-starter for me.

It does look pretty, I think the filtering is very smart, and I like the "smart cards".

1) We address the (fairly complex) questions around authentication in our FAQ: http://inky.com/pages/faq/ -- you have to scroll to the bottom for security details.

2) It will. Give it a little while to find your contacts. :)

How long is a "little while"?

5 minutes or so, unless something is wrong.

Do you have threaded conversation support (like the one in mutt)?

If you mean indenting according to thread parent/child relationships, no. We've found that the majority of users find that really confusing. It also has the negative effect that new mail arrives buried within the thread tree, not at the top where users can see it.

Threaded view might resurface some day for advanced users, but right now it's not on the roadmap.

We do support a (non-hierarchical) conversation, though (of course), as well as a sender-based view that's pretty handy in certain circumstances.

It may be nice, but it looks terrible on a Macbook Retina :-/

Retina support is in development now, it requires moving from CEF1 to CEF3.

I would love to find a new mail client to replace evolution or thunderbird. Will Inky be released for Debian as well?

Does Inky support this?

  - proper mail indexing and search on large mailboxes
  - S/MIME
  - per-account HTML signatures
  - CardDAV
  - CalDAV

Edit: Also, i am wondering what inky's business model is? Will the client cost money in the future? Ads?

We're working on linux support.

    - Inky caches your email on your computer and indexes it.  We'll continue to improve the performance aspects of this.
    - S/Mime and calendar support are on our to-do list.
    - Inky lets you create per-account HTML signatures, and a default signature for the others.

I'm super interested -- do you guys offer notifications/setting reminders on messages for later (like Mailbox.app)? I really need that, because I'm disorganized and forgetful and it saves my ass constantly.

Not yet, but it's on the roadmap. Snoozing emails and related features are obviously requirements these days.

At this point we're mainly focusing on getting the core solid and performing well.

Probably another few months on that; more new features will come in 2014.

Very cool. Thanks for the reply!

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.

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.

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 ..

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.

outlook seems to randomly decide to not set the in-reply-to header, which breaks threading every time someone changes the subject

It used to be that you kept your email private and didn't share the details with anyone. Now, you have to be very, very careful about other 3rd parties trying to access your email - or otherwise convince you that they should be trusted with managing your email account so that they can fulfil their business purpose of building a social tree.

This wasn't really an issue pre-Web2.0. But now with all the effort to construct billion dollar social networks, its quite a common thing for people to just hand over the keys to their email and ignore the risks.

Back in the 80's and 90's, your email password wasn't something you ever shared. Nowadays, its almost like the other way around.

Oh .. as for your criticism of my 'rant', well I suppose I could also finger GMail for the mess that email is in these days ..

I can't speak for Outlook's performance at the MTA level, but the user-facing parts break all sorts of expectations I have from twenty years of standards-compliant email. For instance---just at the tip of a very large iceberg---they have invented a completely new way of representing name/email pairs in the header fields, with the list separator being the semicolon, the email delimiter being square brackets, and a few other things. If I have a list of email addresses from some other source, I have to reformat it just to use it in Outlook.

I have to use Outlook Web Access at work (no alternatives), which is even worse than regular Outlook, and I'm keeping a list of all the ways its user-facing interface is broken. I left the list at work or I'd be able to rant for pages right now.

It's also the worst, Widnows IMAP client I've found, period. I suspect it doesn't implement caching in an intelligent way. I long for a functional version of Evolution for Windows.

Absolutely. The sad thing is that Apple seem to be competing with early versions of Outlook to produce the worst, pretty-but-totally-network-hostile clients.

So basically on a thread about serious bugs in Apple software, you just blamed Microsoft and Google with some vague statement when they had nothing to do with the particular problems.

Google and MS are the evil! Apple shit just works. Etc.

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.

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.

He was complaining about Mavericks Mail app, not iOS'.

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.

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.

Agreed. How is Apple not to blame? If this article was about Gmail instead of Mail.app, every comment would definitely be blaming Google.

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.

> commute to Cupertino from the Bay Area every day

Cupertino is part of the Bay Area. 1 Infinite Loop is just south of the Sunnyvale border and 280. About two miles from El Camino Real. If you're going to make stuff up, at least consult a map first.

> 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.

South Bay, like East Bay, is a qualifier for a sub-region within the Bay Area. The peninsula is referred to as... the peninsula, not "the Bay Area". San Francisco specifically is either referred to as San Francisco, SF, or "the city". Santa Clara County is almost always referred to explicitly as such lest it be confused with the City of Santa Clara. When not speaking of governmental/political boundaries, one would more commonly say "Silicon Valley", "the valley", and sometimes its proper name of "Santa Clara Valley".

You have clearly spent little if any time in the bay area and are hardly qualified to make bigoted judgements about the caliber of engineers based on where they choose to live within it.

Rather than providing opinion about the quality of some of the engineers working at Apple, you're nit-picking about the semantics of the term "Bay Area" and how people use it (nobody in SF I know says they're taking the 101 to visit the "Bay Area", they say "South Bay").

Since I know these people, I know their work, I know from technical discussions the level they're at, I can legitimately form an opinion, and that is they are not great engineers, merely competent. More importantly, they tow the company line, they don't think outside the box, they are anything but mavericks.

Maybe Apple's software is suffering because the culture there means that engineers are too compliant or too scared to speak out and rock the boat?

> nobody in SF I know says they're taking the 101 to visit the "Bay Area", they say "South Bay"

Of course, that would be silly, since they're already in the Bay Area. I bet they don't say they're going to visit California, either. By the way, "the 101" is slightly unusual phrasing, too. Usually it's just "101".

Give it up. You have no idea what the bay area or anyone living in it is like, and it's obvious to everyone. You're the one who made this about geography. Don't get mad just because it exposed you as a fraud.

What a farce.

You've just shown there is nothing wrong with my statement "commute to Cupertino from the Bay Area every day" which you seem to have such a problem with.

Also with regards to:

> "the 101" is slightly unusual phrasing, too. Usually it's just "101".

Are you being serious?!!

One does not commute "from" a place to itself. You're trying to backpedal, but your chain is tangled in the English language's entrails.

It also makes no logical sense, as there would be no reason to mention where they commute from unless you thought it was of some significance, in which case you would want to be clear on where they are commuting from. Or are you now trying to insinuate that every engineer in the Bay Area (now that you've reversed your position and agreed the term is not limited to the peninsula), including Cupertino, is mediocre by virtue of being there, rather than only those engineers from the immediate San Francisco area?

> Are you being serious?!!

Deadly.

At the end of the day, the engineers that I personally know who contract at Apple are competent but not great. They happen to commute. The two are not related. There is no insinuation in the original post that all engineers who commute are mediocre.

I am however insinuating that the culture at Apple may have changed, which allows merely competent engineers to be hired in the first place, while great engineers like Bertand Serlet leave the company, to the detriment of OS X.

As for the 101, you must be trolling...

>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.

The term "Bay Area" has always referred to the nine counties touching SF Bay, and thus includes all of Santa Clara county. I've never heard your definition of "Bay Area" before, and I grew up in San Jose.

The area you're referring to is generally called "The Peninsula".

Rest assured, my definition of "Bay Area" is the same as yours.

One poster, for whatever reason, didn't like me using the phrase "commute to Cupertino from the Bay Area every day".

My Edit to that poster should have been clearer, but all I'm saying is that people I know describe themselves as going to "South Bay" when referring to their commute from the Peninsula to Cupertino, to distinguish the subregion from the whole region.

> Amongst people I know, Cupertino (which is in Santa Clara) is generally referred to as being in South Bay rather than the Bay Area.

People you know are delusional. The "Bay Area" includes the peninsula, south bay, east bay, and north bay. Some people throw in Santa Cruz, which might be a bit extreme, but I've never talked to anyone who lived there for an appreciable time period and didn't include Silicon Valley (and hence Cupertino).

> I've met a few people now who are contracted by Apple to work on their customer facing Apps.

You've met a couple of employees (or maybe contractors?), and you believe that they are representative of thousands of technical staff? That says far more about you than it does about anything else.

As someone who lives in the land of trees and windows (and grew up in the land of the freeway) I count Santa Cruz as part of the Bay Area, there are enough commuters running up and down CA-17 to make it count.

I met a person in San Jose who told me they were from the city, and I asked "Oh nice, me too! Which part are you from?" He named some unheard of district, and I kept asking questions to try to pinpoint where it was, and I found out he was actually from Palo Alto. That's extreme.

That's beyond extreme. I suppose that Palo Alto is formally a City, but ...

People in San Francisco who are going on the commute on the 101 don't say "I'm going to the Bay Area today" - they say "I'm going to South Bay today".

People always orient around themselves. People living in Cupertino or Mountainview might say they live in the "Bay Area" but for people living further North in San Francisco or Oakland, they would consider themselves to be living in the "Bay Area" and folk further South to be living in the "South Bay".

This is just semantics.

> People in San Francisco who are going on the commute on the 101 don't say "I'm going to the Bay Area today" - they say "I'm going to South Bay today".

Of course not; they're already in the Bay Area. People in Palo Alto don't say "I'm going to the Bay Area" when they drive to SF, and people on the Upper West Side don't say "I'm going to New York today" when they take the A train downtown, either. I honestly can't tell whether or not you're trolling, at this point.

Actually I thought you were trolling by saying people I know are delusional because they refer to Cupertino as being in South Bay (which is obviously just a subregion of the Bay Area). Another poster is getting upset because I wrote "the 101" instead of "101". Christ.

With regards to your other point, no, of course I don't think all Apple engineers are second tier, but I do feel that since Bertrand Serlet left, OS X engineering has languished.

Given that I know some competent - but not great - engineers who work at Apple (and they happen to commute) I wonder if the culture at Apple today is more about hiring competent engineers to implement a roadmap, rather than hiring great engineers and letting them loose to "think different".

None of us objected to you saying that people refer to Cupertino as being in the South Bay. What we objected to was the second half of that sentence: "... rather than the Bay Area." As written, this implies that the people in question believe that the South Bay is not part of the Bay Area, which is delusional. Maybe you didn't intend to say that, but that's what you wrote, and what everyone responded to.

Regarding "great" vs. "competent" engineers: every company needs a mix of them. There aren't enough truly great engineers for even just Apple or Google to be entirely staffed by them, much less all of the other companies out there. So everyone needs to make do with merely competent engineers in some roles.

You mentioned in a sibling comment that the engineers in question "contract at Apple"; here you wonder if Apple is merely "hiring competent engineers to implement a roadmap". But that's exactly what all companies hire contractors for, whereas great engineers who are "let loose to think different" are typically permanent employees.

You're right, there aren't enough great engineers out there. I'm just wondering if the direction of the company is an impediment to hiring the best.

Check out the reviews of Pages 5, which has been dumbed down. If the vision and future for OS X is to turn it into a Fisher Price OS for the masses, I can see why a great engineer would prefer to work elsewhere and tackle bigger challenges.

http://mjtsai.com/blog/2013/10/23/iwork-13-a-huge-regression...

http://www.betalogue.com/2013/10/24/pages-5-disaster/

It's the bay area, but we break it up into South bay, and East bay to easily pinpoint the location we are referring to. "She's from somewhere in the East bay", but it's still the bay area; But you don't use it in the following way, "I'm going to the South bay". You would just say, "I'm going to Cupertino/Ssn Jose/etc..." If you're referring to San Francisco, you would just say the city or San Francisco. If you say "frisko", everyone would know you're not from San Francisco.

But implementing an IMAP client is vastly easier. Still frustrating, and the IMAP spec is a giant stinking turd, but most of the most horrific things in implementing an IMAP server is down to all the crap you need to support in case some weird client uses it (and one inevitably does), while a client can choose to stick to a very small subset of the spec.

It may seem that a client implementation is vastly easier, but that is an illusion. Some of the complexity arises from the way IMAP imposes no specific naming model for mailboxes, so the client has to be prepared for that. But most of the complexity comes from dealing with offline operation and attendant state synchronization in a way that isn't horrendously inefficient.

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.

Opera Mail would be that one, but it's interface is not the best.

There is Geary, but I have tried it and it is both lacking in features and pretty buggy. It is quite nice looking however.

Myself I have all but given up on GUI email clients, I still use Thunderbird from time to time but only when I need PGP encrypted email, otherwise I stick to webmail. I am looking forward to Mailpile if it delivers on its goals, looks very promising.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-bac...

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.

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?

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#... )

3.0 was a radical departure from and regression in speed, stability, and usability relative to the 1.x and 2.x series.

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.

Claws disqualified itself by being slow and crashing often when I tried to use it (with IMAP) maybe a year ago. If there's been significant progress since I might give it another shot, but it'd take a long time to have any real confidence in it...

I'll poke at Trojita but it'll have the same confidence issue by virtue of being relatively new.

Evolution flies as a IMAP client. I loathe to use any client with POP.

Have you tried Postbox? (http://postbox-inc.com/) It's a commercially maintained fork of Thunderbird that runs on Mac & Windows, and it's the only email client that keeps my email life sane. (Though I've had to install a plugin to add back email-priority functionality.)

I think Trojitá http://trojita.flaska.net/ has recently crossed the line from being a promising project to being a useful MUA. It has quite a good IMAP implementation.

The author (Jan) has been very active in the standards community, and really cares about getting every edge case _right_ rather than just being expedient. It's a pleasure to work with him.

I've tried lots of email clients but I always end back at Thunderbird. I'm curious, what makes it feel cumbersome to you?

To me, Thunderbird + Nostalgy + Enigmail + Colored Diffs = bliss.

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....

Well no answer.... They told me they knew the bug.... But it's still opened

Well.... Maybe it is because all of your sentences.... sound like awkward murmuring.... with all those extra periods.......

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.

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

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-...

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.

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.

I've been using Sparrow since I got my MBP, and I haven't found any better solution yet.

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/

I looked at Airmail, but it doesn't support S/MIME yet.

Apple is the new Microsoft.

Unfortunately Microsoft is still the old Microsoft.

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

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