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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."
Why doesn't fastmail also use servers that suppress duplicates?
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
never install mac os X.0
It's the most frightening time of year--that heart pounding moment when you spot your open enrollment information lurking in your inbox, rip it open with trembling hands, and scream in horror as your annual premium increase leaps from the envelop and mercilessly feasts upon the insides of your wallet, gnashing and shredding in orgiastic ecstasy until there's nothing left but a handful of pennies and a contemptuously belched up KFC coupon.
Expired, of course.
This terrifying scene will be repeated all across America in the next few weeks.
My own horror show arrived in the mail today. I'll spare you the gory details. Here's the short version: A 25% increase in premiums for the same health coverage I carried last year. For someone on a family plan, that translates into a $1,200 yearly increase.
So congratulations. If you make somewhere around $50,000 a year, then more than your entire after tax annual raise just went to pay for Obamacare. Doesn't that feel FANTASTIC? You're bringing home less this year than you did last year.
And you're one of the lucky ones. See, you have a job. And you got a raise. You're one of life's lottery winners. A one percenter.
I decided to switch to Macintosh when I saw the Vista betas. It was pretty clear that where MS wanted me to go wasn't where I wanted to go.
I mention that because Apple now seems to be my Microsoft. iOS 7 is ugly as fuck. 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.
This must be the Apple build quality that people keep telling me about.
Cool troll.
http://i.imgur.com/KOoBDaK.gif
Not just an address anymore.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
"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!
This version of mail has numerous glitches. The support for Gmail is totally ruined, and it also ends up using more resources than the previous version.
Should have thought twice before upgrading!
Seems like Mail.app has been getting worse since about 2003. I finally gave up on it about 5 years ago - in favor of gmail's web interface. At first I was a little disgusted with myself - but I've never regretted it.
I still use mail on my iOS devices, though. Have not yet seen a better UI for those.
Apple can't have bugs like this- it just works. Maybe they're sending it wrong?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I mean, it is a MAIL program, not a revolutionary new product. The protocols have been out there for years (esp. IMAP). Why is it still buggy? Even worse: why is it buggier than the previous version? If it worked before THERE IS NO F*ING EXCUSE FOR IT NOT TO WORK NOW. Very very very lame.
Apple's response will be their usual, "Our shit doesn't stink".
This is the company that can't correctly implement daylight savings time in an alarm application. You expect them to handle something as complex as implementing an ages old industry standard correctly?
Apple is known for selling lots of shiny bobbles, not for writing solid code.
-Lod
I'm seriously considering switching back to Windows just for some stability in my computing life. I know Windows 8 is crap, but I don't care- because I know Windows 7 will probably be supported in some fashion for the next 10 years.
Ever since Apple switched to this yearly release cycle bullshit, things have gone steadily downhill. Features are almost never completed and only half baked, and you're lucky if they bother fixing any of it with the minor updates. More often then not you have to wait for the next major point release (ugh), which may or may not fix your issue and will probably introduce a dozen other stupid bugs that should have never gotten past Q/A.
Since Apple doesn't do backwards compatibility anymore, you're basically forced into the current version of the OS, which means you're forced into this never ending loop of bugs and crappy release cycles. It's a bit of a software nightmare, actually- especially if all you want is a reliable tool that is there for you that you can depend on NOT changing unless you want to change it.
Apple has always been better at marketing than software engineering. The iSheep hipsters don't care. It's more important to be seen at the coffee shop using a Macbook than actual productivity.
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...
... it's not a bug. You're holding it wrong.
Seriously, how many times are people going to let Apple drop the ball and release a crappy e-mail client. Over-looping and high server utilization are the hallmarks of every other OSX or iOS Mail app version. Wasn't it earlier this year that iOS was knocking Exchange servers offline. Take a look at an Exchange or other e-mail server log file and compare per client entries for iOS / OSX (any version) versus any other client software. It's around 10:1 in access entries.
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?
Gmail isn't IMAP, it emulates IMAP, badly. And there are true IMAP servers out there that aren't much better. IMAP is a complex protocol and many details aren't really cast in stone.
Believe it or not, but Mail.app is actually one of the better clients out there.
Gmail uses a highly non-standard implementation of IMAP, which never worked quite right in the previous versions of Mail.app. Mail is expecting a more or less standards-compliant IMAP server. Well, people complained, so Apple modified Mail.app to special case Gmail. Unfortunately the fix looks a bit buggy at the moment.
What I mean by that is they called Open Source software the issue! Another proprietary bug in plan sight, maybe Oracle should recant what they said.
You're telling it wrong!
PS: It was funny for first thousand times or so. You're late to the party.
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I would avoid iWorks altogether. Believe it or not, I embrace the Microsoft solution here. Office 2011 for Mac works wonders and has Outlook, so fuck the Mail app.
As for versioning and autosaving, kill 'em.
What I like about 10.9 are the tabs in finder (multiple windows can still be used alongside) and the iBooks app. Over the years I had bought a number of books for my iPhone, but never bothered to read them. Now I find I am.