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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."
This must be the Apple build quality that people keep telling me about.
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.
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!
It's certainly not the only bug in 10.9 Mail.
Watch the Mail Activity section when receiving or sending mail. I have no idea what it's counting.
When I receive two emails and it says receiving 415 and 416 of 416 I kinda get concerned.
When sending one, sending 6 of 6... again, what is it counting?
And set up a smart folder that is all Unread mail. Set it up and watch that it's not very smart... Like it really can't tract unread mail at all...
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?
Actually part of the problem is they made Mail.app work better with Gmail, but all the hacks that used to be necessary really screw things up. Apple should've posted a FAQ about the changes rather than quietly make them.
One big change... you need to enable "All Mail" in IMAP now, since the latest Mail.app wants that as the Archive folder (which makes sense). But everyone has it disabled in IMAP since, up until now, it was problematic to do otherwise.
I found https://tidbits.com/article/14219 to be helpful.
#DeleteChrome
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.
I'm using Mail.app with Dovecot as the IMAP server - I upgraded to OS X 10.9 a few days ago, and haven't seen anything weird going on (yet). I sent myself a test email a few minutes ago while watching the Mail Activity window, and numbers appeared sensible. dovecot.index and dovecot.index.cache files on the server aren't ballooning - at 178KB and 11MB respectively.
The Fastmail article mentions Cyrus as the IMAP server. Is it Cyrus-specific, or have I simply not been bitten by this yet? (I get loads of spam, but it gets pre-processed by Spamassassin so Mail.app rarely gets to see any in the main inbox itself.)
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Even enabling All Mail doesn't do the trick - from that tidbits article: (which has been doing the rounds quite a bit)
That is, I can read, move, delete, reply to, or otherwise operate on messages in my Inbox on the Gmail Web site, on my iPhone or iPad, or in another IMAP client, and they all sync up perfectly with each other — but even after several hours, my Inbox in the Mavericks version of Mail doesn’t reflect those changes. It seems not to matter how frequently I tell Mail to check for new messages. I also tried quitting and restarting Mail, rebuilding the Inbox, and forcing a synchronization — several times — but my Inbox stubbornly refused to reflect reality. Occasionally I’ll glance at Mail after having ignored it for hours and notice that the Inbox is closer to being up to date than it used to be, but I can’t figure out when, why, or how this happens. This is the behavior that makes me truly crazy — if I have to keep Gmail open in a Web browser to make sure I’m getting all my messages, I might as well not be running Mail at all.
My boss is a) an Apple fan, and b) a Mail fan. I've had to instruct him and a couple of other senior management not to go to Mavericks for the time being. Because we use Google Apps, and having mail notifications delayed for hours is going to be a problem. Switching to a decent email client would of course solve the problem, but he loves Mail to death, and he'd rather switch the whole company to another mail provider than give it up (seriously - he suggested it because of this). Not that having Mail cause problems is anything new; my personal favourite is the way Mail does embedded attachments, causing most other mail clients to struggle to handle his messages - usually, they end up with half an email, the attachment, and a second (and sometimes 3rd and 4th) set of attachments with the rest of the email message piecemeal. And then he complains that people can't read his bloody mail.
Showing that it's not just Gmail getting f***** up the IMAP by Maverick Mail will be quite useful to argue the real problem, as usual, is Mail.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
If you're using [Gmail] as the IMAP path prefix, try getting rid of that, too. That solved all my problems.
Not to comment on the rest of of your note (I don't use GMail so have no idea what its support is like, on either end) but on your other complaint I have a hard time agreeing:
Not that having Mail cause problems is anything new; my personal favourite is the way Mail does embedded attachments, causing most other mail clients to struggle to handle his messages - usually, they end up with half an email, the attachment, and a second (and sometimes 3rd and 4th) set of attachments with the rest of the email message piecemeal. And then he complains that people can't read his bloody mail.
I have seen this but the garble I've experienced has only been with users with Outlook. (There may be other clients with problems reading them -- I don't know.) I've looked at those Apple Mail.app-generated messages and they appear to me to be completely RFC compliant. Very strictly so.
Now Apple Mail may or may not suck, but in this case they appear to me to be blameless.
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...
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...
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
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...
I decided not to go beyond 10.6 the moment I saw "Edge Resize" in 10.7 :-((
As OS X users finally get the power to unintentionally resize their terminal emulator windows when trying to select text that goes right up to the margin, just as other UN*X users have had for ages. :-)
(Yes, I've done that on a number of times on FreeBSD/Linux/Solaris/etc. inside $PICK_YOUR_TERMINAL_EMULATOR, but didn't feel the joy of doing that on OS X until Lion.)
... it's not a bug. You're holding it wrong.
This does not actually happen on OS X... But now I'm curious... how on earth does that happen on other UN*Xs?
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?
Well, if you're interested, I'm looking to sell mine. Mind you, as you can see in this post's header, my ID is so low, it's not even listed. Wrap your head around that one: It's so low, it does not need numbers! /. (almost on every article ever, in fact - usually multiple times). So, in order to protect my reputation, if we can agree upon a price, I will have to reset my karma so that you don't get that benefit.
Of course, I've been posting regularly here on
If that's acceptable to you, then please contact me. I'll leave no contact details - as a long-time poster here, I'm one of those arrogant folks who feel that if you don't have the skills to find me, you don't get to buy my account.
Good luck,
A.C.
Out of curiosity I've just tried, with every terminal application I have (xterm, lxterm, uxterm, gnome-termonal, konsole...). I can't do it. Perhaps I'm incompetent? Or perhaps it's a bug in some specific window manager? Or perhaps Guy Harris is special?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
In Ubuntu at least, the area of sensitivity for dragging a window border appears to be microscopic (actually one pixel). This makes it unbelievably difficult to grab a window border on those occasions when you do want to resize a window. I guess accidentally finding that one-pixel-wide column when trying to select text at the edge must be an application of Sod's Law (aka Murphy's Law).
How are you unintentionally clicking your mouse on the window border while trying to select text? Just hovering over it doesn't do it, just dragging over it doesn't do it ... not sure what your problem is but you have to actually click the border to drag it. Clicking in the window then dragging over the border doesn't do anything.
Do you have pulsy or something?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
Running what window manager? In Unity on 12.04 theres a good 5-10 pixels worth of border to grab on to.
Those things happen. Slightly less often on OS X because they added some constraints on resizing triggers. But all the annoying beauty of this brain-dead idea is there: distracting pointer/cursor changes, unintentional resizes when something completely different was meant. Lost workflow focus, lost time re-sizing the window back to what it was supposed to remain.. And what's worst is that this s**t can't be turned off properly. True, one can edit the plist with either editor or "defaults" command but turning it off this way introduces rendering errors in many windows. Especially there, where the resize gadget is supposed to be placed.
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
Why doesn't fastmail also use servers that suppress duplicates?
"This is legal IMAP, so our server proceeds to create a new copy of each message in the folder."
Because thay followed the standards, unlike Google that made this bastard imap like interface that has very poor "wake up" performance.
iOS 7 is ugly as fuck.
Millions of people love it.
But you, personally, hate it.
So... it must suck.
Millions of people love the Kardashians, Honey BooBoo and Jersey Shore. Your point is irrelevant.
How are you unintentionally clicking your mouse
I don't have a mouse, but presumably you meant "mouse or trackpad".
on the window border while trying to select text?
By having the pointer a slight bit to the left of the left-hand edge of the text in the window.
ust hovering over it doesn't do it, just dragging over it doesn't do it ... not sure what your problem is but you have to actually click the border to drag it.
Wrong. The cursor changes from the text cursor (meaning it'll select text if you drag it) to the horizontal resize cursor (meaning it'll drag the border) before you hit the border.
Do you have pulsy or something?
No.
If I ever did that, I'd stop working and have my eyes and brain checked for: 1.Not seeing the cursur icon
Sorry I didn't notice the cursor image change in the few milliseconds between hitting the region where selecting grabs the border and clicking the trackpad.
2.Using mouse when working with a terminal
In which desktop environments can I copy text from a terminal window without using a pointing device?
Out of curiosity I've just tried
If you're trying, you're probably doing it slowly and carefully enough that you don't hit the window border drag region. This happens (on occasion, not particularly often, but often enough to be a small irritation) when I'm doing a quick select-and-copy (or, when not on a Mac, a quick select-and-paste-current-selection).
It appears to only be that one user so far - I've seen a few isolated "copy into same folder and expunge the old ones" in the logs (now that I log that) but not enough to be a pattern.
There was a problem with the initial release of Unity on 12.04 where the border selection areas were very small and hard to grab. It was corrected in 12.10; the borders weren't actually made visibly larger but the selection area was. The correction was also backported to 12.04, and Ubuntu variants that use a different window manager (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu) never had the problem.
And of those, the vast majority didn't adopt it by choice, they just let their device install the update when it notified them that one was available. They use it now whether they like it or not.
I bought a new phone with iOS7 preinstalled so I never had a choice in the matter, but I've been perfectly fine with it. The icons are kind of bright but the applications themselves are clean and sterile in their design. The visual flair (animated backgrounds, parallax effect) are superfluous but easily disabled.
/* No Comment */
BTW, the comment link on your page doesn't actually DO anything. You should write a bug with the details, even though it's hitting only one user. bugreport.apple.com
The truth hurts, newbie?
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
I did, and I've passed the user's contact details on to the engineers at Apple so they can talk to them directly. I've also re-enabled the account, and I'm just keeping an eye on the server that the user is on and moving some other users off so we can afford the disk space for a bit.