Apple mail “bug” turns out to be user script after all | Hacker News Reader

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

blog.fastmail.fm

181 pointssygma52 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm getting crazy random unread-mails badges on both dovecot imap servers and gmailimap...

This happens to me in Thunderbird / Postbox on Win7 and OSX, leading me to believe it's some old edge-case IMAP bug

And since Gmail is a very popular mail service, with a special account type in Mail, you would think it would be well tested.

Why? Shouldn't it be the case that Gmail uses standards?

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.

Mail is buggy with Exchange as well.

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).

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.

I get this too but on a few k emails - definitely less than 10k.

and unfortunately, always has been.

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.

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.

> 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.

How do you compose plain text in reply to someone who sent both?

Hit reply. Choose “Make Plain Text” from the format menu or Shift-Command-T.

I counter your example of anecdata with my piece of anecdata of Mail 7.0 working perfectly fine with 8 IMAP accounts.

Bug reports aren't "anecdata".

Today's new awesome Mail 7 behavior: reply-all to a mail with 10 recipients, get 10 new messages in my inbox all from me!

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!

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

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)

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.

I had this. For me enabling the "All Mail" folder in Google's IMAP setting fixed this after a lengthy resync.

Unfortunately I've had that enabled the whole time :(

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.

To be fair, the osx 10.7.* and 10.8.* versions of Mail.app have been almost flawless for me.

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.

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.

They switched to Dovecot a while back actually.

Ah, interesting, did not realize that. Seeing people like yourself in the git stream made me think otherwise:)

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.

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.

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.

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.

and wait to become redundant ?

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.

For sufficiently large values of n.

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.

Someone is going to write a Medium post seriously suggesting this and HN will react as though it's genius...

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.

There is (or should be) a difference in the response for bugs reported by a single in house tester and bugs reported by a single external user.

"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.

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.

For context, here's the original blog post from Fastmail: 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

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

So all the vitriol about this issue was simply misplaced?

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.

So it was just nastiness waiting for a made up justification.

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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com