Mail.app: When the love fades…
Kim Cavanaugh and Fraser Speirs are both feeling strangely unsettled and unhappy with Mail.app. Somehow the love is fading.
Kim finds that Mail treats their relationship with less respect 
than it once did. Now it lets all sorts of spam into his Inbox.
Now back in the day, those would have gone directly into the Junk folder. But not now. Something has changed. Somehow you just don’t seem to care anymore.
Fraser can’t put a finger on his dis-ease. Mail.app, he says, has simply been “behaving atrociously for me over the past couple of days”.
And he is not confident that a better email client will ever emerge:
This is one area where Apple’s involvement has not benefited consumers because Apple’s offering is uncharacteristically poor. There is some demand for such a product and I’m sure there are developers able to build a good mail client. Unfortunately, Apple’s presence in the market with an almost-good-enough free product makes it an exceptionally risky investment for any company.
Of course one never knows what’s just around the corner. It’s possible that Leopard will fix all Mail’s ills and give it a fresh injection of life. Who knows. Communication with the user community is not a strong point with the Mail Development Team.
As far as I know there are only two other hopes on the horizon. Allan Odgaard of TextMate fame has hinted that a friend of his is working on a new email client. If Allan is involved, I’d have high hopes for the finished product.
Matt Ronge is also working on a new IMAP-focussed mail client, Kiwi.
As a hard-core email client monogamist, I’m never tempted to stray. Even in deepest Mail.app IMAP hell, I know the relationship is making me a better person. As the good book says,
Tags: Apple Mail, email clients, gripes, imap, mail.app, seven year itch, spam, unhappy userssuffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.
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July 26th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
Kim should probably try give SpamSieve a try. Alternatives would be to switch to a email provider that marks spam probability in the headers of email, or use Gmail as a spam filter.
July 27th, 2006 at 1:19 am
Since my first version of Mail.app with OSX 10.1 I have had a love-hate relationship with Mail.app.
Until 10.2 came out it didn’t work with my corporate mail servers. Update after update it got better and better. Now, with each update, I wait to see what has broken.
The last few updates have caused Junk mail to NOT be handled properly - even though a detailed search of the release notes showed that there were supposedly no changes to the junk mail code. Then Junk mail filtering started working properly - again with nothing in the release notes or change log to indicate that any work had been done in that area. And the most recent update has broken it again.. sort of. Some mail is still being filtered but not nearly as much as before.
I have tried all the tips and tricks from clearing out the junk mail settings and resetting the ‘training’ data - to backing up everything and starting from scratch again. Nothing ever seems to affect how it treats junk mail.
Searching through Apple’s forums provides nothing but complaints and useless suggestions — I don’t have the option of changing my corporate email “provider”.
July 27th, 2006 at 1:44 am
“suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”
Wait…I thought that was Yoda.
July 27th, 2006 at 1:46 am
Anthony,
I would suggest giving SpamSieve a try, if you are able to. It works a lot better than Mail’s built in filtering. I have a license for it myself but Gmail’s spam filtering is so good that I no longer use it.
July 27th, 2006 at 2:48 am
Microsoft Outlook Express for PCs will remain the choice of the world for email. I love Macs, my adult children use Macs….and have since they were in grade school, but Apple seems incapable of desiging a long term functional e-mail program that compares to the present day Outlook Express that comes standard with XP. Mail .app just doesn’t perform, no matter how many chances I give it. Of all the appearance designs, I like Mail.app the best… but like my first wife, seems to have all the right equipment, makes all the right moves, but doesn’t seem to work long term, no matter what I try to make it part of my life.
I just purchased a new black Intel MacBook for no other reason than to run Outlook Express for my email under XP while remaining functional on one computer under OSX. I don’t know if Apple planned things this way but it will sell many MacBooks/MacBook Pros to people who demand the best and don’t settle for compromise on programs we must use everyday.
Mail.apps biggest problems are the annoying quirks and its many incompatibilities in the Windows world.
Hey Apple…take a page out of the Microsoft manual and copy their code…sometimes you can just get a better product from what already exists.
July 27th, 2006 at 7:06 am
It may not be Mail that has changed. Just look at how Junk mails look nowadays. I think the Junk mail systems just got smarter and now produce email addresses and subject lines which are much harder to target with a generic junk mail filter (bayesian?).
July 27th, 2006 at 10:36 am
I found this the other day on digg. It explains my recent spam problems with all email accounts. Check it out - it may explain yours as well. A sudden cure does not look good.
http://tinyurl.com/edk6x
July 27th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Thanks, Bob. That looks interesting and explains some of the unusual spam action in my own inbox.
July 27th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
More on the “New Spam”. Here is a snippet of an email I sent to a friend. Not the complete picture but maybe some insight and a way to test if you are getting this new kind of spam.
Pay particular attention to the address field of this spam. What you find will amaze you.
This is I fear a major win for the Dark Side and it will take major effort to resolve.
Meg,
I notice that when I try to reply to you the spam example you sent is not returned to you. I find that if I hold the mouse down over the spam portion of the message you sent and drag it to the Desktop I get a document titled “unknown.gif”. This suggests to me that most of the file is a graphic attachment with maybe only the addressing as text. The addressing, of course, must be readable to send the message.
Whoever is doing this is also very clever about the addressing. It is as if they are either looking at mail I have sent to pick names or they have ripped off my address book.
This is going to be a tough challenge. It is not the fault of Apple Mail or any other mail program or computer platform. I don’t think it is going to be as simple as fooling with filter settings to eliminate this scourge.
Bummer!
Bob
July 27th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Thanks for mentioning this new variety of image spam. Fortunately I haven’t been victimized by it and hopefully won’t be.
What’s been frustrating me most recently is the rubbish I’ve been unable to stop from landing in one inbox that’s always addressed to an address specifically used for correspondence with MacUpdate which has somehow been obtained by spammers. Still no response from Joel Mueller after reporting it to him with a sample, which hasn’t made me feel any better about this.
Bob wrote:
I’d sure like to know how the MU address mentioned above was leaked. I’ve discovered only a few other instances of spam mysteriously addressed to other infrequently used, semi-private addresses. I seriously doubt they were randomly generated or obtained from a compromised PC abook. Far more frequently used and easily guessed addresses in the same domains have remained private.
There’s no security in any clear text communication over the net, but it’s unavoidably inevitable without severely restricting activities. And securely-stored data won’t necessarily remain that way; systems/databases do get cracked. Trusting parties can be nefariously hijacked.
July 27th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
Sorry to disagree, guys; but, SpamSieve is great only until you try POPfile and realize there’s something much, much better out there. POPfile runs circles around SpamSieve, and just about every other spam filter I’ve ever tried, for that matter.
POPfile uses a superior classification algorythm, learns way faster, is more accurate, and is not fooled by email content changes like the ones you mention that got through Mail’s filtering. It’s also open source, and works with virtually any POP mail client - it can even serve multiple computers on your network. Do yourself a favor and check it out. You’ll never go back!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POPFile
http://sourceforge.net/projects/popfile/
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/popfile_stats.html
PS: I am not affiliated in any way with the POPfile project, other than that I have become a loyal “customer” after using POPfile for almost two years now!
July 27th, 2006 at 11:54 pm
Image spam is nothing new. I’ve been getting those for years. And they are not impossible to detect and filter out either — though I’m not aware of any application doing it yet. Even though the attachments have different names etc, the images themselves are the same and it wouldn’t be too complicated to come up with an MD5 sum or some other signature to detect and filter them out.
In fact, virus scan smtp servers would be prime candidates for this type of filtering - if they don’t already do it.
Of course the best way to eliminate spam is not to get any in the first place. I have multiple email addresses - some are “public” and known and others are private. I don’t get any spam on the private addresses.
July 28th, 2006 at 12:10 am
When the love fades, it’s time to look for alternatives. I am getting more and more frustrated with mail.app even though it serves my needs and doesn’t really crash too much.
The thing is that there are so many apps that are exciting to use but this is just not one of them!!
have you looked at the evolution client by Novell ?
http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/
It seems like it’s got potential but i can’t find any reviews as far as the mac version goes.