
Mac OS 10.9 – Infinity times your spam - brongondwana
http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/26/mac-os-10-9-infinity-times-your-spam/
======
nknighthb
Have you reproduced this problem yourselves? It sounds like you've seen it
with exactly one user so far, whom you've not been able to contact. This
strikes me as something that could just as easily be due to a pathological set
of rules one user created.

~~~
fredsted
Also _lots_ of users, developers or not, have been using the betas recently.

I'm no mail server expert, but I don't understand OP's conclusion, that ALL
Mail.app clients are faulty.

~~~
brongondwana
I mentioned a couple of other bugs in that same post that I _have_ been able
to reproduce, and both the Mac users I've spoken to have also been able to
reproduce when they set up new accounts.

Not showing folders that exist on the server, that's super confusing.

Checkboxes that don't work - well, that's a common preferences bug - auto-
turning-back-on of settings.

And not testing that you're copying to the folder that you've selected, that's
a rookie mistake. Any software which makes changes to another machine over the
internet should be checking that it's not causing an infinite loop.

------
coldcode
Email is always a bitch. Google's implementation of IMAP is a disaster as
well. I have yet to find any email app on any platform that I can't swear at
daily. I even tried to write my own before sanity returned.

~~~
dmbaggett
GMail's IMAP server actually works well... it just violates the spec in
several obnoxious ways.

For Inky ([http://inky.com](http://inky.com)) we had to devote a bunch of
Gimap-specific effort into explicitly syncing flags, for example, because
Gimap simply doesn't notify clients of flag changes. Inky has to poll Gimap
for flag changes rather than passively learning about them via IMAP IDLE.

And the treatment of labels as folders is a mess for IMAP clients, as is the
All Mail folder, which -- if not handled properly -- effectively generates a
duplicate of every message in every folder.

But Gimap does work reliably in our experience. It's a bit slow, but it's less
broken than IMAP servers run by other major providers (who shall remain
nameless).

~~~
bengotow
Is there any way to use Inky without it syncing all of my account passwords to
the cloud? It looks awesome, but I just can't do that.

~~~
dmbaggett
No. But it's important to realize that we don't actually store any of your
mail in the cloud. You're not really syncing to anywhere but the Inky instance
on your device.

------
kyro
I would very much appreciate an iOS 7 stripping of Mail.app. I've developed
this aversion to opening up the app, and if I do by accident, it's a panicked
scramble to quit. It's bloated and clunky. I would consistently get connection
errors, it would randomly decide to re-sync all of my mail attachments, and
more. I've been on Sparrow for a year or so now and have had zero problems.
It's funny, across all of my Apple devices, I don't use any of the native mail
apps for one reason or another. On iOS, I use Mailbox.

~~~
tomphoolery
In Settings > Mail, Contacts & Calendars, there's a section called ACCOUNTS.
Click on all of them and turn "Mail" off. This way you'll still get everything
else in Calendars, Contacts, et. al., but when Mail.app opens it will be
empty.

~~~
newman314
The problem is that most (all?) mail apps other than the default Mail app on
iOS do not properly spawn when you are in another app and choose the Send as
Email option.

I use the Gmail app for most of my mail and Mail for work Exchange. I've
caught myself multiple times inadvertently trying to send a funny article
using work email. Ugh.

~~~
malandrew
This requirement that certain app functionalities may only be provided by
Apple's own apps needs to be challenged in court via a class action suit so
that they may be forced to unbundle these. These apps should be deletable and
you should be able to programmatically assign their responsibilities to
another application of your choosing.

We've had this capability on the desktop forever. There is not pro-consumer
argument Apple could make for denying a setting that lets you change this.

------
eknkc
I think it's one user with a fucked up mailbox rule that copies stuff around
or something like that. Apple also runs iCloud mail servers on IMAP, I think
they would catch that if it was a widespread issue on betas.

~~~
oleganza
I know at least 2 people plus myself who have the very same problem with Gmail
IMAP and new Mail.app.

~~~
uxp
Gmail is a worse offender of the IMAP protocol than Apple Mail.app has ever
been.

~~~
dirkgently
Thanks for providing compelling evidences that totally beat the ones provided
in the original article.

------
hboon
Mail in Mavericks is bad.

Since the previews, I have not been able to archive emails for Gmail accounts
or Google Apps for Business. A subset of mails archived directly on Gmail will
appear and stay in Mail's Inbox. I'm not sure where the developers for Mail
went to that they didn't have the resources to fix it. Maybe to help with the
iOS 7 crunch?

~~~
rsl7
In my head, Mail.app was written for Steve, who I imagine was a read-reply-
delete kind of a guy, and not much else mattered.

~~~
ams6110
Mail.app is an old NEXTSTEP app. It's probably one of the oldest apps on the
platform, and it's always sucked.

There was even a windows version for a while, which you could get if you
bought NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework for Windows NT.

~~~
rsl7
Yes, I'm aware of this, which is why I said what I did.

------
ricardobeat
> I discovered my second attempt to contact the user about this problem in
> their Junk folder tonight.

Peeking into a user's mail box? I know it's all plain text anyway, but this
article makes me feel a bit uneasy.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
There's a difference between message contents and meta-data. Even the logs
often contain the subject, folder, and TO/FROM frields.

It is pretty hard to diagnose issues without at least gathering basic
information on the state of an account.

Not really sure I see the issue. If Google, for example, had an issue and they
needed to examine the meta data surrounding individual pieces of my email I'd
likely be alright with that as long as they didn't read the message's
content/body or any attached files which I view as quite private.

~~~
ricardobeat
The subject + from + to fields already expose a lot of information, and should
be considered just as private as a message's content. I would expect it to be
at least truncated in some way to prevent rough employees from accessing user
accounts, still debuggable just as easily.

------
leephillips
This is good news: it seems as if Apple's quality control is improving. After
all, there is no report here of Mail.app actually deleting messages[0] _[EDIT:
oh, well]_ or sending out hundreds of copies of a message.[1]

Despite this improvement, however, I think I shall continue to avoid this
company's software in favor of more mature, open source solutions.[2]

    
    
      [0]http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12758081&amp;tstart=0
      [1]http://lee-phillips.org/iphoneUpgradeWarning-4-2-1/
      [2]http://www.mutt.org/ (http://www.washington.edu/alpine/ might be OK, too.)

~~~
0x0
To me it seems like QA is declining. I just experienced data loss with the new
Mail.app 7.0: Moving mails out of inbox to another folder left a copy in the
inbox. Deleting the copy in the inbox also irrevocably deleted the other copy
in the other folder. Smart mailboxes just don't work properly, doesn't auto-
refresh, incorrect non-refreshing or just plain random "unread email count"
badges, table column "Mailbox" shows "Archive" no matter which folder a mail
_actually_ belongs to, random 100% cpu usage for extended periods of time even
when left idle, etc. etc. etc.

The old version that shipped with 10.8.5 had none of these problem at all.
Mail.app went from being perfect to being actively hostile :(

~~~
kbd
The QA failure most shocking to me lately is that on 10.8.5 on their newest
MacBook Airs, Apple forgot some file necessary to use the video camera in 32
bit mode and therefore broke Skype.

Microsoft, for all their faults, is notorious for having fantastic QA and not
breaking old apps when they update Windows, and would never have let that
happen. You'd think when you update the camera that you'd check such a popular
app as Skype.

Point is, it seems like the Mail team isn't the only place QA is lacking at
Apple.

~~~
mratzloff
> _Microsoft, for all their faults, is notorious for having fantastic QA and
> not breaking old apps when they update Windows, and would never have let
> that happen._

Windows 8.1 has had a number of severe problems.[1][2][3]

[1] [http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2013/10/21/win-
rt-81-pulle...](http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2013/10/21/win-
rt-81-pulled/1)

[2]
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2013/10/17/windows-8-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2013/10/17/windows-8-1-upgrade-
not-working-after-3-attempts-on-2-machines/)

[3] Anecdotally, a coworker tried upgrading on two separate devices (after
Microsoft pulled 8.1 for awhile and then made it available again). On both it
installed fine but disabled all of his Metro apps from starting.

~~~
kbd
Relevant:
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html)

See the parts about backwards compatibility. I'll grant that Microsoft isn't
as fanatical about backwards compatibility as they used to be.

------
Lagged2Death
_The 4 million message 32 bit limit of the UID field..._

Maybe I don't know how mail works, but shouldn't that be 4 billion? I imagine
disk space would become an issue before a 32 bit identifier became an issue.

~~~
blahedo
Yes, I noticed that too. I assume this was a brain fart on the part of the OP
---2^32 is definitely 4 billion, not 4 million. (Well, approximately.)

~~~
brongondwana
Yeah, sorry - late night. The 2^32 limit is something we've never seen hit by
real software.

(we do have a testing account with top-bit UIDs and MODSEQs set to make sure
nothing is trying to do signed maths with them)

~~~
Lagged2Death
Love your service, by the way.

------
davidcollantes
I find Mail.app to be OK now. The only think I am missing (and my main gripe)
is strict threading. I just hate receiving my daily Google remainder (or lack
thereof) and seeing the long list of previous emails with same subject
associated on the same thread. Hate it!

Does anyone knows if there is a way to get strict threading —without changing
the client?

------
RexRollman
I've been reading about IMAP for more than a decade and I keep hearing about
how hard it is to get right, for both the client and the server. I've wondered
why this is. Is the standard too complicated? Is it written in way that allows
for too much interpretation?

~~~
jpallas
You can't understand the IMAP spec until you have been personally berated by
Mark Crispin. Unfortunately, Mark has passed away, so the number of people who
understand the spec is only going to decrease.

~~~
grinich
Haha so true, RIP.

Thankfully his responses are saved for posterity in the imap-protocol
discussion list archive. ;)

[https://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/mmsearch/imap-
prot...](https://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/mmsearch/imap-
protocol?config=imap-
protocol&restrict=&exclude=&method=and&format=long&sort=time&words=mrc+at+CAC.Washington.EDU)

------
mahyarm
Someone suggested [http://airmailapp.com/](http://airmailapp.com/) as a
replacement email app for OSX in a recent HN thread and I've been very happy
with it. Only downside so far is it doesn't have outlook contact integration,
so you don't get autocomplete for all the email addresses in your company
unlike microsoft outlook. Which is too bad, because airmail + apple calendar
is much faster than microsoft outlook.

~~~
eknkc
Airmail is really good. I have a couple of problems but the developers are
really responsive and bugs are getting fixed pretty fast.

------
apostlion
Mail.app has these issues consistently, across versions. Which is a real
shame, because UX-wise it is a really fine mail client.

Also, threading algorithm changed slightly in Mavericks, leading to many more
mistakes than ever before.

------
dmbaggett
If you're sick of the mail program that comes with your OS, try Inky
([http://inky.com](http://inky.com)). It's still in beta, but we just put out
a refreshed version that fixes a lot of issues users reported throughout 2013.
Lots of polishing work still remains, but we're happily dog-fooding it and
have a loyal following around the world. (And yes, Linux guys, we're still
planning to release a version for Ubuntu -- finally.)

Inky is a clean-sheet mail client implementation written with Python and
Chrome Embedded Framework. It's taken us several years to get it to this beta
stage; give it a try and let us know your thoughts at <hi@inky.com>. It's
currently free; we'll likely offer upsell freemium versions at some point,
once we're satisfied with it.

Mail is hard.

~~~
bdcravens
Couple of things that bug me:

1) I have to log in to your service. Why? Makes me think you're storing my
mail credentials on your server. If it's a cloud sync issue, use
Dropbox/iCloud.

2) Doesn't use my Contacts in To: field. This makes it a non-starter for me.

It does look pretty, I think the filtering is very smart, and I like the
"smart cards".

~~~
dmbaggett
1) We address the (fairly complex) questions around authentication in our FAQ:
[http://inky.com/pages/faq/](http://inky.com/pages/faq/) \-- you have to
scroll to the bottom for security details.

2) It will. Give it a little while to find your contacts. :)

~~~
bdcravens
How long is a "little while"?

~~~
dmbaggett
5 minutes or so, unless something is wrong.

------
fit2rule
_sigh_ I really miss the good ol' days of e-mail, before all these Web 2.0
people hit the scene with their "let us scan your mail for other addresses"
this and their "we'll keep a safe copy of your email as a backup, using IMAP"
that ..

Frankly, though, I blame MS Outlook. When it hit the scene, email became a
thorny mess of standards, almost-standards, and not-standard at all .. and it
seems the rest of the industry is quite happy following that disastrous path
to oblivion set out for us with the MS Outlook/Exchange competition.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
I honestly have no clue what you're getting at with your first paragraph.
Email hasn't changed very much in the last fifteen or more years, so I'm not
sure what changes the "Web 2.0 people" made you're referring to, your examples
are pretty odd ("scan other addresses" what?). Also keeping a backup of
deleted messages for a period of time is standard industry practice and has
been since before I or Linux were even born.

As far as MS Outlook and standards: That little rant reads like it was written
about web-browsers and you just replaced "Internet Explorer" with "MS
Outlook." MS Outlook uses a fairly standard implementation of IMAP/POP3/SMTP
and has since forever. Microsoft have their own ActiveSync mechanism which
isn't a standard, but no competing solutions have really appeared which
compete with ActiveSync (and replace IMAP) so while you could blame them, you
could also blame the complete lack of innovation in this space.

~~~
blahedo
I can't speak for Outlook's performance at the MTA level, but the user-facing
parts break all _sorts_ of expectations I have from twenty years of standards-
compliant email. For instance---just at the tip of a very large iceberg---they
have invented a completely new way of representing name/email pairs in the
header fields, with the list separator being the semicolon, the email
delimiter being square brackets, and a few other things. If I have a list of
email addresses from some other source, I have to reformat it just to use it
in Outlook.

I have to use Outlook Web Access at work (no alternatives), which is even
worse than regular Outlook, and I'm keeping a list of all the ways its user-
facing interface is broken. I left the list at work or I'd be able to rant for
_pages_ right now.

------
lakwn
I'm not an iOS user, but doesn't it sound a bit unprofessional for them to
write such post on their main blog? Won't it piss off iOS users, who are not
responsible for Apple's bad practices?

I think such rants should indeed be made public, but maybe there was a better
outlet for FastMail to do that.

~~~
a-nom-a-ly
Out of curiosity, do you mind explaining why you think it's unprofessional?

> Won't it piss off iOS users, who are not responsible for Apple's bad
> practices?

In many(most?) services abuse of the service is met with suspension, etc. IMHO
this case clearly counts as an abuse of the system regardless of whose fault
it is.

------
lars
I don't blame them. I had a go at implementing an IMAP server once, and it
ranks as one of the most frustrating programming experiences I've ever had.
The standard is huge, fragmented, and is full of strange requirements to
fulfill every thinkable use case a client may have. These small details end up
heavily dictating the architecture of your application. I don't see how could
implement IMAP without completely throwing out most of your work several
times.

To make things worse, there is hardly any way to know when you've done it
right. I'm not even sure there is a right way. When you start looking at how
actual email clients speak IMAP, you'll see that they all manage to ask for a
list of emails in completely different ways. It's a small wonder that these
systems appear to work at all.

~~~
cmyr
I think you can still blame them. They're a corporation with a 470B market
cap, designing machines for which email is a primary use-case. They employ
thousands and thousand of engineers. They should be able to build a mail
client. Many much smaller organizations manage alright.

~~~
Segmentation
Agreed. How is Apple not to blame? If this article was about Gmail instead of
Mail.app, every comment would definitely be blaming Google.

~~~
yapcguy
Yep.

What real innovation has there been on Mac OS X since Bertrand Serlet left?

Where are all the adult engineers?

I've met a few people now who are contracted by Apple to work on their
customer facing Apps. They commute to Cupertino from the Bay Area every day.
Nice people but they're second tier. They never critique Apple, think Apple is
the best at everything, and shrug their shoulders at any technology developed
outside of Apple. There's always an excuse for things that don't work, from
broken iCloud APIs to Apple Maps.

They're competent engineers, they'll do what they are told, but they're not
the mavericks who will break new ground. Just my opinion, but perhaps this is
something other people have experienced.

EDIT: To poster below, with regards to the Bay Area which covers a large
geographic region, I'm talking about the San Francisco peninsula area. Amongst
people I know, Cupertino (which is in Santa Clara) is generally referred to as
being in South Bay rather than the Bay Area.

~~~
stephencanon
> Amongst people I know, Cupertino (which is in Santa Clara) is generally
> referred to as being in South Bay rather than the Bay Area.

People you know are delusional. The "Bay Area" includes the peninsula, south
bay, east bay, and north bay. Some people throw in Santa Cruz, which might be
a bit extreme, but I've never talked to anyone who lived there for an
appreciable time period and didn't include Silicon Valley (and hence
Cupertino).

> I've met a few people now who are contracted by Apple to work on their
> customer facing Apps.

You've met a couple of employees (or maybe contractors?), and you believe that
they are representative of thousands of technical staff? That says far more
about you than it does about anything else.

~~~
dmak
I met a person in San Jose who told me they were from the city, and I asked
"Oh nice, me too! Which part are you from?" He named some unheard of district,
and I kept asking questions to try to pinpoint where it was, and I found out
he was actually from Palo Alto. That's extreme.

~~~
stephencanon
That's beyond extreme. I suppose that Palo Alto _is_ formally a City, but ...

------
grn
From the comments I draw the conclusion that a solid, open source, GUI e-mail
client would have great popularity. Are there such clients out there? I used
Thunderbird under Linux but it feels cumbersome.

~~~
nknighthb
I've searched in vain for an alternative, open or closed, to Mail.app on any
platform ever since Mozilla lost its mind and released Thunderbird 3. I can't
find anything fast, simple, stable, and maintained. The next best option I've
found is, of all things, Outlook (Mac or Windows), not that it's particularly
desirable, either.

~~~
aidenn0
I've used claws in a pop environment; it beats the pants off of evolution as
an e-mail client. I haven't tried its imap though. I stopped using thunderbird
about 7 years ago when it deleted messages off of a Pop3 server before
noticing that the disk with my mailbox on it was full, thus losing dozens of
messages. People tell me it's better now, but I'm currently happy with claws.

I've recently been trying trojita as my imap client (have been using mutt
otherwis). It's fairly feature simple, but blazingly fast.

~~~
nknighthb
Claws disqualified itself by being slow and crashing often when I tried to use
it (with IMAP) maybe a year ago. If there's been significant progress since I
might give it another shot, but it'd take a long time to have any real
confidence in it...

I'll poke at Trojita but it'll have the same confidence issue by virtue of
being relatively new.

------
Ramattack
I already have too a bug opened to apple due to an incorrect handle of uidl
with 0 at left... I opened it like one year ago... Still no answer... This bug
is in all ios apple mail clients....

~~~
Ramattack
Well no answer.... They told me they knew the bug.... But it's still opened

~~~
heinz
Well.... Maybe it is because all of your sentences.... sound like awkward
murmuring.... with all those extra periods.......

------
look_lookatme
I've generally been happy with Mail.app in Mavericks until yesterday evening
when I got a notification center pop-up for a new mail and accidentally
clicked the delete option, instead of reply. The email completely and utterly
disappeared from the client and the server (google apps imap), wasn't in any
Trash or All Mail folder.

It was gone completely based off an errant click on a pop-up notification.
Kind of scary.

------
msie
It sounds like IMAP is a stinking turd of a standard for servers. Is there an
alternative in the works? Like IMAP lite?

------
ss64
Apple mail “bug” turns out to be user script after all October 29, 2013
[http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/29/apple-mail-bug-turns-
out-...](http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/29/apple-mail-bug-turns-out-to-be-
user-script-after-all/)

------
matwood
Is there another mail client for OSX that also supports gmail and s/mime?

After the disaster that is the Mavericks Mail.app, I've started using
Thunderbird. It can't be the only option out there.

~~~
dmak
I've been using Sparrow since I got my MBP, and I haven't found any better
solution yet.

~~~
lobster_johnson
Sparrow is no longer being maintained, though. Personally I am pretty happy
with the switch to Airmail [1], which has all the same features, at the
expense of some minor, not very annoying bugs.

[1] [http://airmailapp.com/](http://airmailapp.com/)

~~~
matwood
I looked at Airmail, but it doesn't support S/MIME yet.

------
fennecfoxen
Apple is the new Microsoft.

Unfortunately Microsoft is still the old Microsoft.

------
cochese
Great times insulting office software outside of the office. The end result of
this article boils down to: who cares?

