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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."

2 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Whar is wrong with programmers? by immaterial · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. iMail has a history of infinate recursion by maas15 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...