Apple Mail’s most annoying bug?
Andrew Escobar, the developer of Mail Stamps, has posted a stinging attack 
on Mail.
He’s had enough of it endlessly flashing up a password rejection alert when the password is fine but the connection has timed out.
He writes:
I dread the days when Mail decides it doesn’t want to work properly. This particular bug drives me insane. Mail keeps rejecting my email password, even though its correct, to the point of utter insanity.
Is this Apple Mail’s most annoying bug? I think it is. Pierre Igot, Apple Mail’s most perceptive and eagle-eyed critic, thinks so too.
There are other things that make me cranky—stalled IMAP actions, the delsp=yes option that results in broken URLs—but this one takes the cake.
As Andrew point out, the Apple tech note on this issue doesn’t tell the whole story:
This can happen if the mail server is not available for authentication or cannot be contacted. Click Cancel, then wait a few minutes. After waiting, choose Go Online from the Mailbox menu, then enter the same password.
A quick experiment with Thunderbird or Entourage soon demonstrates that the problem is most often only with Mail.app.
There are two work-arounds for this issue (although there are no real fixes):
- Some people report that the problem is fixed by decreasing the frequency of mail-checks to 5 minutes or more.
- An AppleScript on macOSXHints promises to fix the problem by forcing accounts back online.
The Mail development team has just hired a fistful of new engineers, so an actual fix for this most irritating Mail bug (user-definable time-out preferences in the Incoming Mail Server preferences?) is no doubt just around the corner.
AFTERTHOUGHT: To be fair, I don’t think it is always Mail’s fault. For example, I never get this error with my Fastmail IMAP account, but I do get it often with my new Joyent IMAP account (as do others ). Both services use the same mail server software, Cyrus , so whatever the real explanation for the bug is, it’s complicated. Someone reading this must know the answer. I don’t.
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April 14th, 2006 at 2:17 am
Mail.app’s IMAP functionality is basically borked.
First, there is the “save sent mail on server” bug where, well, it doesn’t (although there is a workaround)
Then there is the “all my mail is now gone” bug, although I am not sure if that’s a Mail.app problem, or if that’s just the nature of IMAP. I had quite a bit of mail in my inbox, switched DNS of my domain (had to change servers), and connected to the IMAP server on the new server. I watched as my inbox went from several hundred messages to *ZERO* in a few seconds. Oops.
April 14th, 2006 at 2:43 am
Mail bugs I find most annoying:
+ emails sent to me from squirrelmail webmail accounts at cox.net, bellsouth.net, optonline.net etc. come with the “From” field set to the email address surrounded in brackets: without the person’s name . Mail doesn’t deal with this very elegantly, especially when you try to reply to the mail. Mail mangles the To header in the new reply mail document. The address looks like this (email@emaildomain.net> ). If you right-click (or control click) on the address and choose “Edit Address” it turns into this: “email@emaildomain.net> . This technically *works* as an email address but it is hairy butt-ugly. It would be much better if mail simply turned it into the email address itself, without the brackets: email@emaildomain.net. Brackets are only required per the RFC when the user’s name is included.
+ I have my Junk folder set to delete messages older than one day. It refuses to perform this task unless I quit and re-launch Mail. Even then, it always leaves a bunch of emails behind in the mailbox, undeleted older than the one-day old threshold date - especially so with ones found in the Junk>On My Mac mailbox.
+ If I’m paging through mail in a given mail box using the space bar and I get to the end of one message and it goes to the next unread one, the scroll of the next message in the queue inherits the scroll of the previous message. In other words, I get to the end of the message, hit the space bar and it goes to the next message and the new message appears already scrolled all the way to the bottom.
+ html-formatted text on incoming mail often renders too small and doesn’t pay attention to minimum size parameters set for webkit in the plist file. Mail from AOL users is particularly prone to this, but they are not alone. I wish Mail had a setting similar to Safari’s Advanced Preference: “Never use font sizes smaller than [n]” for html and rich-text mail messages.
+ There’s a bug when you use other than system sounds for mail alerts. I have “Hawk_Screech.mp3″ a sample sound Apple distributed with iMovie when it first came out. I use that to let me know when important mails come in - it’s the same sound you hear in movies set in the outdoors to let you know something important has happened . Anyway, after a while Mail goes mute and makes no sounds whatsoever when I use a rule-based sound alert.
+ the message list pane never gets first-responder focus, so keys such as page up, page down, home, end and the arrow key equivalents for those functions cannot be used to move through the list of messages. A better example of how this is handled is NetNewsWire. You can use the arrow keys to move the focus around from the list of blogs to the list of headlines in a blog, and the navigation keys work in whichever pane has the first responder focus.
April 14th, 2006 at 2:48 am
I’ll try this again - the angle brackets were munged in the comment just above because they were interpreted by WordPress as formatting tags:
+ emails from squirrelmail webmail accounts from cox.net, bellsouth.net, optonline.net etc. come with the From field set to the email address surrounded in angle brackets (represented in this blog comment by curly brackets so they’re not mistaken as formatting tabs: {email@emaildomain.net} . Mail doesn’t like this format. It mangles it completely when you reply to the message and it looks like this (email@emaildomain.net} { email@emaildomain.net {email@emaildomain.net}). If you right click on the address and choose “Edit Address” it turns into this: “email@emaildomain.net} { email@emaildomain.net” {email@emaildomain.net}. This works as an email address but it is hairy butt-ugly. It would look much better, and would be more proper, if mail simply rendered the email address itself, without the brackets: email@emaildomain.net
April 14th, 2006 at 5:33 am
password rejection alert:
You can quickly find out that it is most often mail.apps fault.
Just check the connnection from mail.app’s own menu.
The mail server can be reached, authentication passes ok, but nevertheless mail cannot be sent.
This has to be fixed!
April 14th, 2006 at 6:19 am
This bug is annoying, but I find the “0 messages, 100 unread” bug *much* worse.
April 14th, 2006 at 7:47 am
I had alot of problems after the 10.4.6 update only with Mail oddly enough … finally after not being able to SEND outbound iMAP emails for days and loosing a few Draft copies I did a complete reinstall of the combo updater and sure enough …… Alles Klar Herr Kommissar!
April 14th, 2006 at 10:51 am
I use Mail.app with IMAP. My provider is LuxSci and I have yet yo have a problem.
April 14th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Not sure what you mean by “outbound IMAP”. SMTP is used for outgoing messages; IMAP for incoming.
April 18th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
CM Harrington wrote:
“First, there is the “save sent mail on server†bug where, well, it doesn’t (although there is a workaround)”
PLEASE tell us the workaround - I have this happenming on a friend’s machine and it’s driving us mad!
April 19th, 2006 at 12:06 am
@gerry:
The workaround, if you haven’t seen it yet, is simple.
1) create a folder on the server. Name it anything you want (although I think Sent Mail may be reserved)
2) Select the new folder on the server
3) in the Mailbox menu, choose “Use this mailbox for…”, and choose “sent mail”
That will trick it into working. You may have to do this for all accounts
April 19th, 2006 at 12:22 am
Thanks - I managed to google it; it was buried in a discussion on Apple’s support site. It works but how the hell has this escaped Apple’s notice?
April 19th, 2006 at 12:25 am
@gerry
No problem. As for escaping Apple’s notice, clearly it hasn’t (as the discussion is on Apple’s servers). They have just chosen not to fix it. There is a difference, and one that doesn’t make Apple look good.
April 19th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
Any recommendations how to undo an “Use this mailbox for…” operation without deleting the mailbox?
April 19th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
How about creating a new empty mailbox on the IMAP server, selecting it and then nominating it with the “Use this mailbox for…”, thus freeing up the one you want released.
Then you can delete the new one, leaving the choice available again.
Will that work?
April 20th, 2006 at 5:34 am
Yeah, that’ll probably work. Just wondered if there were a quicker “Don’t use this mailbox for …” method I’d overlooked.
May 26th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
The one that really annoys me at the moment is that the “Move message” action of rules will not move messages from inbox (that are say > 365 days old) to another IMAP folder properly. The messages are moved but it does not DELETE the original message from inbox.
This could be something to do with whether or not the original message in inbox had a local copy of its body or not. Either way, it’s completely broken.
May 27th, 2006 at 6:33 am
Hi Marc. Did the issue you describe happen after creating a new rule with the “Move message” action and letting “Do you want to apply your rules to messages in open mailboxes?” run it? I recently did something like that with one of my wife’s IMAP mailboxes and due to an error it unintentionally moved many older messages and deleted them from the original mailbox. But the destination mailbox may have been local, not an IMAP mailbox… I’d have to double-check that.
Interesting thought. I think my wife’s account is configured to copy everything except attachments.
Which IMAP server software does your account use? My wife’s FastMail account uses Cyrus IMAP.
One problem I occasionally have when moving messages between IMAP mailboxes is they don’t immediately appear in the destination. That happened again yesterday when moving a message from Junk to INBOX. And a couple months ago I irrecoverably lost a couple messages moved from Junk to INBOX. That account uses UW-IMAP, if that matters. UW-IMAP was completely reliable for home usage with Mulberry so I’d rather blame Mail.
There was recent discussion in A solution to Mail.app’s IMAP woes about the IMAP protocol not having a “move message” operation. I’ve wondered if problems Mail has moving messages under IMAP account might be implementation bugs related to that.
September 20th, 2006 at 7:57 am
[...] I’ve recently started reading Hawk Wings, a blog focused mostly on Apple’s Mail.app and other personal-information programs like iCal and Address Book. I’m always keen on ways to tweak Mail, but I was moved to actually write about it by the recent post Mail’s most annoying bug. It got me thinking about all the ways Mail could be better. [...]