Slashdot Mirror
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."
I filed some bugs on Mavericks' Mail right after the first developer preview came out (all ended up being marked as duplicates, so others were having the same issue). All were closed the week before the GM was released. And all are still present in the GM; they're MailGmail specific. However, enabling "All Mail" and removing [Gmail] from my IMAP path prefix made everything work.
Clearly, whoever rewrote Mail to "better" support Gmail decided that as long as it worked okay with just the right settings, any deviation from that wasn't a bug but just user error. Despite the fact that those settings were both perfectly valid and *incredibly* common.
I think moving OS X to a yearly release schedule results in them pushing things out too fast. It's bad enough with iOS, and OS X is a more complex beast.
OS X has been going downhill (the autosave/versioning sucks for how I use software) and now with 10.9 mail.app regressions and iWorks losing features. I'm not upgrading to iOS 7. I'm not sure if I'll upgrade to 10.9 I need to buy a new computer in a couple months so I may switch to OpenIndiana. Maybe Linux for steam box, we'll see.
The last uphill version was 10.5. This current 10.9 is in big part back-pedalling the visuals of 10.7/8 without removing the functional crap they introduced. I decided not to go beyond 10.6 the moment I saw "Edge Resize" in 10.7 :-(( So... no, thanks - even being free (as beer) doesn't make it more appealing..
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
Ships? For the past 3 releases Mail.app will randomly choose not to display the body of a message. I have to quit and reopen Mail.app just to read my e-mail sometimes.
I thought it was just me and something screwy with my account, but the other day I asked a coworker and immediately heads began popping up from cubicles everywhere within earshot, with people admitting they've had precisely the same problem.
Apple's focus on iOS and cute little phone apps has, for whatever reasons, caused defect rates in their core desktop code to serious balloon. Maybe it's because they've greatly expanded their workforce, and there's only so many decent engineers in the valley. I dunno....
I used to admire the high quality of Apple software. Not anymore. And I was never an Apple fanboy. My relationship with Apple was purely practical. They shipped an excellent laptop with a command-line, and I spend 90% of my time staring at terminal windows and logged into various Linux, OpenBSD, and other unix servers writing low-level C code. I still like their laptop, and damnit the command-line stuff still works well enough, but in the other 10% of my time I spend using Apple software, quality has surely dropped precipitously.
I once criticized in Slashdot post Apple's recent flagging support for POSIX. An actual Apple engineer replied, but rather than see refutations in his post, to my eyes I just saw confirmations and excuses. While Apple is too busy to support the latest extensions and addendums to POSIX, the teeny-tiny OpenBSD and NetBSD teams have been furiously becoming more compliant, including useful extensions of their own.
Apple isn't doomed, but the glory days of OS X are gone. iOS will destroy OS X. But all you app developers writing the 10,000th calorie counter... I'm sure you're rejoicing in all those endless tweaks to Objective-C.
This isn't the first infinate recursion iMail bug. Around five years ago I worked for a webhost at which we had customers complaining about there being nothing in their INBOX. When we checked, we'd find a giant tree of INBOX folders - for some reason iMail would create a new subirectory called INBOX every time it logged in, and then make the *new* INBOX folder the default INBOX. All the mail would still be delivered to the original inbox...
"There's no software that ships with critical bugs these days."
You'd better believe the stuff that ships with my food production systems is FLAWLESS.
When an entire country's population relies upon your tech to even stay alive, you make sure your shit works.
And I work on a budget a billionth Apple's worth.
What's their fucking excuse?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.