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Mac OS 10.9's Mail App — Infinity Times Your Spam
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."
From the summary: "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." Which I assume means that it was really only 2MB of emails, but the duplication (ie millions of emails) used up 2GB.
Well, software that generates a thousand copies of junk (seriously, the spam folder of all things...) isn't very typical.
One of the reasons they noticed the issue is they don't actually delete expunged messages for a week (the blog post says for backup purposes). The Mail bug, for whatever reason, duplicates the junk mail and immediately cleans up after itself by expunging the originals. If the server were actually deleting them it wouldn't be such a critical issue (but an issue nonetheless).
It's also worth noting though that so far, there is only a single report of this, despite the author implying they have a huge number of users. Most likely this isn't something that happens on the average Mail install; it could be that Mail is hitting some error condition on this user's specific account and that is causing the bug to manifest.
[...] I mention that because Apple now seems to be my Microsoft. iOS 7 is ugly as fuck.
My fucks are always beautiful. Or at least pretty (when I am more desperate).
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
Sorry, I'm not quite sure where you're getting your information about what Mail.App does. I'm getting mine from the server telemetry logs where the client first identifies itself as:
"name" "Mac OS X Mail" "version" "7.0 (1816)"
And then proceeds to issue a COPY command:
UID COPY 3360991:3361069 "INBOX.Junk Mail"
See the "COPY" in there. I am the author of the blog post, and I think my credentials in this particular case trump yours, even if you're the author of Mail.App.