In recent days two big hitters have aired their grievances about Mail.app.

Pierre Igot (read his “Talking Mail.app” interview) at Betalogue describes the odd way in which Mail handles format=flowed text.

If you place your cursor at the beginning of a line of quoted text and hit return, Mail actually inserts two returns. Pierre says:

I don’t care what the reason for this is. The reality is that it is purely and simply wrong. There is no excuse for inserting two return characters where the user only meant to insert one.

What’s more, he says,

there are still many “smaller” bugs such as this one that have not been fixed. And, frankly, there is no sign of them getting fixed any time soon. At this point, bug reports about such “minor” flaws simply remain unanswered.

Rui Carmo (read his “Talking Mail.app” interview) at Tao of Mac also unloads on Mail in a big way in a recent post.

Rui prefaces a long list of over twenty bugs in Mail.app with a plea:

Apple, this is not a MUA. It’s a shambles…. In fact, I’m willing to bet a lot of people will tend to agree… especially those who use Mail.app professionally, against big e-mail archives or to keep track of mailing-lists other than the local knitting club.

mail.app, apple mail, Bugs, format=flowed, quoted text, way too many problems from Rui to condense into a technorati tag

Adam Rice has written a fine piece on the current shortcomings of Mail and how it could be made better.

It is more considered than the responses to TUAW’s “How Mail sucks” campaign and more comprehensive than the Talking Mail.app series, in which celebrities and developers were only allowed to nominate the one thing they disliked the most.

He divides his suggestions into two groups: one for things that are simply “broken” and need to be fixed, and another for areas in which a better Mail.app could be truly innovative.

Posts like this deserve to be read.mail.app, apple mail, shortcomings, bugs, improvements, threading, filters

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):

1. Some people report that the problem is fixed by decreasing the frequency of mail-checks to 5 minutes or more.
2. 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.mail.app, fastmail, joyent, apple mail, authentication, bugs, tearing my bloody hair out, password rejection

Over at The Tao of Mac, Rui Carmo reports on how Mail.app eats your email.

If a particular SMTP server is not available and you click OK to Mail.app’s suggestion of resending it from another server before Mail.app re-renders the message, it vanishes.

Well, almost. Everything vanishes except the headers, so the recipient gets a tantalising hint of what might have been.

As Rui says, Brilliant.

Read the other things that Rui has to say about Mail in his “Talking Mail.app” interview.mail.app, apple mail, bugs, resending, SMTP server, tao of mac, rui carmo

The recent security flaws in Mac OS X have produced a range of responses. But in a lengthy article, IT columnist and Unix administrator John Welch sets a new high point.

It’s not enough to be (extra) careful about opening attachments in emails that you are unsure about. More drastic action is required:

If you are using Apple’s Mail, I’d consider switching to another mail program, at least temporarily. The problem with Mail is that it allows you to open a file with a single click, and there’s no warning from the application to give you a second chance to cancel that action. Neither Thunderbird nor Microsoft Entourage allow for this, so you might want to think about switching until Apple fixes that.

Oddly, later in the article he suggests: “Just take the common-sense steps that we all should be taking anyway, and you’ll be fine.”Mac osx, security, vulnerability, mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, entourage, attachments, scripts

Heise Online has a report outlining how the shell script execution flaw in Safari also applies to Mail.app.

Both apps will execute scripts without asking permission in certain circumstances.

As the report explains:

It suffices to disguise a script with the ending “jpg” and assign the Terminal application for opening it. If this script is then sent in the AppleDouble format as an attachment, the information is passed along so that the recipient’s system also opens it with the Terminal.

Apple Mail displays the attachment with a JPG file symbol, but when users click on it, the script executes within Terminal without further prompting. This has been tested on Apple Mail 2 and Mac OS X 10.4. Older versions display a warning.

You can experience the flaw for yourself. The Heise Online site provides an example email which demonstrates the problem. It arrives with what looks like a JPG attachment. Clicking on the JPG file executes a harmless script in Terminal containing the command /bin/ls -al.

It’s in German, but enter your email address in the text box on this page and click the button marked “Anfordern”. Then click on the link in the confirmation email and an example is on its way to you.

An immediate fix is to move Terminal into a different folder. The general fix, of course, is never to open attachments in emails that you are unsure about.

Thunderbird, the article points out, doesn’t fall for this trick.security flaw, scripts, terminal, mail.app, apple mail, attachments, AppleDouble, bugs

Pierre Igot at Betalogue has noticed an odd bug in the way iPhoto 6 sends some photos to Mail.app for emailing.

If you change the orientation of a photo in iPhoto and then try to email it by sending the image to Mail.app, the orientation change gets lost.

It only happens the first time you try it though. If you kill the email and try again from iPhoto everything is fine. Odd.