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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."
Not just an address anymore.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
From the summary: "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." Which I assume means that it was really only 2MB of emails, but the duplication (ie millions of emails) used up 2GB.
Well, software that generates a thousand copies of junk (seriously, the spam folder of all things...) isn't very typical.
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.
We de-duplicate on COPY, so there was only one copy of each email on disk. We don't de-dulplicate metadata though, because it's usually so small, and generally in the cache file of a different folder, where de-duplication isn't possible.
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...
If you think the 'stuff that ships with my food production systems is FLAWLESS' you are an idiot who doesn't understand the way the world works.
I've worked in food production and medical, nothing is flawless, you have to be an idiot to make such retarded statements.
You mitigate the risk, try to double/triple/quadrupal check for problems and build in fail-SAFE systems, but you are not flawless.
Your statement sounds more like an arrogant cluebie beginner who's going to get a nice spanking when reality finally hits.
Nothing is flawless, to imply you've created something flawless shows your ignorance.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
... 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?
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.
Sorry, I'm not quite sure where you're getting your information about what Mail.App does. I'm getting mine from the server telemetry logs where the client first identifies itself as:
"name" "Mac OS X Mail" "version" "7.0 (1816)"
And then proceeds to issue a COPY command:
UID COPY 3360991:3361069 "INBOX.Junk Mail"
See the "COPY" in there. I am the author of the blog post, and I think my credentials in this particular case trump yours, even if you're the author of Mail.App.