Pierre Igot at Betalogue has discovered a 100% reliable way to make Mail.app destroy an email. Not lose it, but destroy it.

The procedure is complicated and involves copying an email from one mailbox to another in your Mail Drawer, then immediately clicking on another mailbox and then hitting Command-Z or selecting the “Undo” button from the Edit menu.

If you manage to do this while Mail.app is still transferring the initial message to its new mailbox, hitting Command-Z will not undo the initial move, but cause the email to vanish completely.

Pierre is not impressed:

It is really quite unacceptable. There is no excuse for it. It’s quite obvious that it’s a problem related to Mail’s multithreading capabilities. Mail can move a message in one thread and let you select another mailbox in another thread at the same time. But this screws up its “Undo” sequence completely, and Mail clearly forgets where to put the message back when you undo the action! So it just lets the message vanish altogether!

Data integrity is always paramount. We can live with bugs that make simple actions more complex than they should be, or force us to go through workarounds to achieve what we want to achieve. But bugs that destroy our data with no chance of recovery are simply bad. They are the worst kind.

Take a read of his whole post. Or his whole blog. There’s a lot to learn there.

Apple Mail’s most eagle-eyed critic doesn’t miss much.

Similar Posts:

• Betalogue: Two more Mail.app annoyances
• Roll your own templates in Mail.app
• 10 most useful keyboard shortcuts
• A solution to Mail.app’s IMAP woes
• What is a Smart Mailbox?

Tags: bugs, Data integrity, email, mail.app, mailbox, multithreading

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 24th January, 2006 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Bugs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.