Mail.app: So long, farewell, aufwiedersehen, goodbye
François Joseph de Kermadec, who posts on the O’Reilly MacDevCenter site, got quite a fright 
from Mail.app today:
Today, Mail went postal (hmm, do I chalk up that one as a bad pun or coincidental wording?) on me. Deleting a message would make it reappear. Moving anything would duplicate it. Corruption crept everywhere, in subtle ways. Nothing was really reproducible but nothing was totally random either. In other words, hell.
As a result, he is giving up on Mail with a mixture of anxiety and hope.
The rest of his post is an interesting tour through the innards of Mail.app’s Mail folder, weighing the good and bad things about its organisation and arguing that the app’s development has brought about too much complexity:
To me, Mail’s facade is the best of all Mac OS X applications out there. The way it thinks about mails, the way organizes them. But looking into its Mail folder just shows how it has evolved and, more importantly, how dramatically it did, with no signs of slowing down. Too much in too little time, really. For example, should a crucial application like an email client rely on the first version of system-wide frameworks (I’m thinking Spotlight here)? Should an application take it upon itself to create an SSL-capable account automatically upon first startup without turning SSL on and without giving the user a chance to stop sending the password in the clear (.Mac indeed)?
He’s not sure what client to switch to. And there’s the rub. For all its quirks, it’s hard to beat Mail.app as the most satisfying email client out there. Not least, the control it gives to users through an abundance of plugins is unparalleled.
He’ll be back.
Tags: Apple Mail, Mail folder, mail.app, plugins, switching, unhappy usersRelated posts
May 11th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Thunderbird has an abundance of plugins. It doesn’t seem fair to say that the plugins for Mail makes it unparalleled… I know Tbird has its problems, but it at least parallels Mail.app in plugin support (if not surpasses it!).
What Tbird doesn’t have is an abundance of OS X developers eager to make it a real competitor… Oh well…
May 11th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Sure. I thought about that as I was writing. I like to play fair.
But then I decided, Mail’s edge is not just about the numbers of plugins; it’s about quality.
Where are the MailTags and Mail Act-on for Thunderbird, or the variety of notification extensions that produce such pretty and informative alerts, or - due to the lack of applescriptability in Thunderbird - the scores of scripts offering user-customisable options that Thunderbird users can only dream of?
May 11th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
I too am considering ditching Mail.app for a number of reasons. In no particular order:
I have to use an Exchange server at work, and can get Entourage to connect to its Outlook Web Access (OWA) service with no hassles. Mail.app on the other hand…for the past couple of weeks, Mail.app has been drifting off into “beachball Hell” as I reach (scroll or click) the last message in my Inbox. This is fairly consistent and requires a Force Quit and restart to sort itself out.my very strong preference would be to use a single tool of each type to manage my email, calendar and contacts. Entourage’s “takeover” approach is unappealing.
The thing that’s keeping me bound to Mail.app is its comfortable and useful connectedness to things like Address Book, iCal and kGTD, both of which I rely on heavily. If I could get iCal syncing with multiple calendars from Entourage a la kGTD, rather than the all-or-nothing “Entourage” calendar, I’d be using Entourage in a second.
All that said, Mail.app is still my preference by a long stretch. If only I could solve my issues and have it play nice with OWA.
May 11th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
That’s annoying. I had a bunch of nice formatting in there and it’s vanished. Sorry about subsequent unformatted readability.
May 11th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Hmmm… What kind of formatting? Hawk Wings accepts almost anything, AFAIK.
Golly, Lucida Grande looks awful in italics :(
May 11th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
Where is the IMAP tag support in Mail.app? Heck, while we’re at it, where is the realistic IMAP support in Mail.app?
And Thunderbird scripts are just JavaScripts… It’s just too bad that the bundle they come in makeks them inaccessible to most users who aren’t very curious. Additionally, as you point out, there’s no Apple Script support. If there was, Mail.app would have a competitor. But I mentioned that… The biggest thing that Tbird lacks are OS X developers.
If Mail.app didn’t have such crappy IMAP support, I’d be there… Meanwhile though… I just have to make do with Thunderbird. (didn’t you have a quote on recently about a relationship with a mail client is a complex one where you just take what you can get?)
May 11th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Perhaps I sounded too bolshie. If so, apologies.
Of course, you do need to take what you can get. Personally, I like Thunderbird a lot. Just not quite as much :)