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."

Comments

Re:Whar is wrong with programmers?

[immaterial]

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.

Re: Apple Build Quality

[BitZtream]

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.