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Mac OS 10.9's Mail App — Infinity Times Your Spam

Posted by Soulskill on from the that's-a-lot-of-spam dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Email service FastMail.fm has an blog post about an interesting bug they're dealing with related to the new Mail.app in Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks. After finding a user who had 71 messages in his Junk Mail folder that were somehow responsible for over a million entries in the index file, they decided to investigate. 'This morning I checked again, there were nearly a million messages again, so I enabled telemetry on the account ... [Mail.app] copying all the email from the Junk Folder back into the Junk Folder again!. This is legal IMAP, so our server proceeds to create a new copy of each message in the folder. It then expunges the old copies of the messages, but it's happening so often that the current UID on that folder is up to over 3 million. It was just over 2 million a few days ago when I first emailed the user to alert them to the situation, so it's grown by another million since. The only way I can think this escaped QA was that they used a server which (like gmail) automatically suppresses duplicates for all their testing, because this is a massively bad problem.' The actual emails added up to about 2MB of actual disk usage, but the bug generated an additional 2GB of data on top of that."

8 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Apple Build Quality by johnsie · · Score: 2, Funny

    This must be the Apple build quality that people keep telling me about.

  2. Re:I guess I have to ask by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Why doesn't fastmail also use servers that suppress duplicates?

    The guy who approved it sent the approval via email on a Friday evening ... from his Mac. Since the recipient received millions of copies over the weekend he just figured it was spam.

  3. One infinity drive. by MRe_nl · · Score: 4, Funny

    Not just an address anymore.

    --
    "Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
    1. Re:One infinity drive. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      If you're making a joke about the address of Apple's corporate HQ, you got it wrong:

      1 INFINITE LOOP
      CUPERTINO CA 95014-2083

  4. All hail Apple's new storage technology! by chrism238 · · Score: 2, Funny

    "The actual emails added up to about 2MB of actual disk usage," So the 1,2, or 3 million emails occupied just 2MB of storage? Wow, Apple should be widely lauded for being able to store each email, including its header, in just one byte!

    1. Re:All hail Apple's new storage technology! by Bronster · · Score: 4, Funny

      We de-duplicate on COPY, so there was only one copy of each email on disk. We don't de-dulplicate metadata though, because it's usually so small, and generally in the cache file of a different folder, where de-duplication isn't possible.

  5. As someone once said... by feranick · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... it's not a bug. You're holding it wrong.

  6. It's a defense against the NSA by dutchwhizzman · · Score: 4, Funny

    By generating so much metadata, the NSA will overflow and your real messages' metadata will be overwritten!!!1!.

    --
    I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?