Four things that Mail.app can’t do
Hugo Haas has been wrestling 
with Mail.app.
Frustrating for him but interesting for us, he’s found four things that Mail.app can’t do:
- IMAP over SSL does not work if used through an SSH tunnel
- SMTP over SSL does not work if a SOCKS proxy is in use
- When a SOCKS proxy is set, excluding a hostname or domain does not work: it just makes any connection to a matching host fail
- Using an PAC file does not give satisfactory results (I don’t remember the details of this one, but basically I bumped into a number of issues)
I’m not so sure about the last one. Mail seems to negotiate the proxy.pac file at my work without any problems. I’ve never tried to do the other three myself.
Still, it’s nice to know that there is still room for improvement in Mail.app and the hope of even better things to come.
Tags: Apple Mail, bugs, mail.app, socks, SSH, SSLRelated posts
October 16th, 2006 at 12:58 am
How about #5: Handle LARGE IMAP accounts. I have approximately 40,000 messages, across 23 folders, on my IMAP server, connected to my Dual G5, over GigE, and a click on a folder containing 25,000 messages results in a 4+ minute wait for the text to be displayed, while the activity window shows Mail.app re-indexing, or syncronizing EVERY folder… Again…
And yes, I’ve deleted and rebuilt ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index several times…
Thunderbird handles this account with ease, but it’s lack of intergration and it’s overall “Not Apple” feel keeps me away from using it as a Mail.app replacement.
Lately, I’ve just been using the webmail interface (Squirrel mail) on the server. Not ideal, but much faster than Mail.app, and not as frustrating as Thunderbird..
Am I the only one with Large IMAP issues?
October 16th, 2006 at 8:23 am
Don asks,
Certainly not…
http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/08/21/can-mailapp-cope-with-heavy-loads/
October 16th, 2006 at 8:54 am
I’m starting to find that Mail can’t even handle a large number of emails downloaded via POP. I’m at 3.5GB of email now and the larger folders, e.g. inbox (15,000 emails) take a fair while to display.
October 16th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
I’m certainly the same as Dan, and Don’s third point (who’s on first?).
My account has more than 20,000 messages, which was stubbornly slow to load. So I moved most of the old ones to a separate folder which I only use when I’m searching through my archives. It’s annoying, but at least it band-aids the slow-load problem.
As for a PAC file, I don’t seem to be able to connect at all through my uni proxy. Again, extremely annoying.
October 16th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
Liam! Are you using a Mac now? :)
I have this problem only with the folder containing my Whirlpool emails. Too much gas-bagging and not enough article writing ;-)
I’ve archived them off as a result which is less than ideal, esp, if you need to search them for data.
October 16th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
I have a strange problem. There is no OUTBOX listed on Mail.app for me! Is this a default option, or some strange bug?
October 16th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
Yeah! For sure! Brand-spanking new MacBook. Well, maybe not so new. I bought it in August.
Did you do that in a similar way to how I did it? Or have you devised some far more efficient way that I could never imagine dreaming up? :)
ps — I like the tunnel picture at the top; it took me a while to figure out what it was, but I appreciate it now that I understand!
October 17th, 2006 at 12:09 am
@Shaanin - The Outbox doesn’t normally appear. An email goes straight to the special Sent folder (which changes its name to “Sending…” while the email is on its way).
The Outbox only appears if Mail can’t actually send the email for some reason.
Admittedly, it stays visible after connectivity is restored and the email is sent, which is untidy.
October 17th, 2006 at 12:58 am
@Liam - Congrats on the purchase.
I haven’t in fact archived it in any fancy way at all. They are all in normal folders. I tend to shy away from dedicated archiving apps like MailSteward and to trust in the power of Spotlight instead.
Still, I’m tempted by EagleFiler.
October 17th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
While I saw greatly hoping the commenting on this post would be relevant ;-) , I can’t but help chime in:
I regularly hear complaint about poor IMAP support and I have the same amounts of messages and data that many of you have across two different account, BOTH of which are served by OS X Servers.
It is possible that Mail’s IMAP support isn’t THAT bad, but is rather just incompatible with some of the plethora of different IMAP servers out there? Does it use something proprietary to allow it to be painlessly compatible with OS X Server?
September 6th, 2007 at 4:55 am
I have a moderately large IMAP account (~1GB of mail and ~100,000 messages) which I run on a very underspec’d Linux box and I’ve actually found that Mail.app is the *best* of the available clients from a speed and reliability point of view.
One *key* thing seems to be how you set the caching options.
* In “Mail.app - Preferences - Accounts - - Advanced”
* Set “Keep copies of messages for offline viewing:” to “All messages, but omit attachments”
One problem I have seen is that on *very* slow mail servers (talking > 5 seconds to load each message over a LAN) Mail.app does seem to freak out and doesn’t seem to be able to manage your read/unread message states. Which is infuriating :-)
PS. I’m also a sysadmin who used to support a fairly large mail server with lots of Thunderbird and Mail.app (and other sundry) clients.