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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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.