Although my own experience of the 10.4.7 update and Mail.app has been completely trouble-free, not everyone has been so lucky. MacUser carries a good summary of some general problems.

MacInTouch has a collection of readers’ reports about problems following the recent update. Almost all of them mention Mail. The posters either have problems or are just disillusioned like this one:

It’s been how many years now, that Mail has been out? How many updates to the OS, and still, *still* Apple has not fixed the problem that Mail has wrt long URIs: It breaks them in such a way that only Mail seems to be able to handle. Users of other Mail software are unable to click on the resulting links.

With the 10.4.7 update, they’ve certainly addressed some bugs in Mail, but this is STILL not one of them. I think the argument can be made that it’s more serious than some of the ones they have fixed.

I’ve reported this bug several times to Apple, as have my colleagues, but maybe we need a more public rant.

I don’t think that Apple will “fix” this problem. The “delsp=yes” flag that triggers this behaviour (read more about it in an earlier Hawk Wings post) is well-documented in the RFC standard.

Apple (I imagine) doesn’t think this is a bug in Mail.app. It’s the rest of the world that lags behind, and we Mail users must wait for other email clients to catch up.

We just have to take the taunts of our non-Mail-using buddies on the nose, or use one workaround or another in the meantime.mail.app, apple mail, 10.4.7, problems, bugs, frustrations, broken URLs, delsp=yes, RFC

On the Apple Discussion Boards, Steve Jones notes that Mail.app has the annoying habit of adding an extra return to paragraphs quoted in a reply.

It doesn’t happen all the time, and it seems to happen whether the reply is in plain text or rich text format.

I’ve noticed this myself and have shared the concern of another poster in the same thread:

I hope my original messages aren’t being displayed to the recipient like this, ’cause it’d really make me look like an idiot!

This is possibly not the most pressing issue facing a user of Mail.app, but it does nag away in the back of my mind.

Why is it so? Can anything be done to fix it?mail.app, apple mail, bugs, text, replies, extra spaces, looking like an idiot

Hawk Wings reader Leonardo Burci emailed today to tell me something about Address Book and Mail.app that I didn’t know.

He writes:

Create a Group in Address Book. Add people containing valid e-mail addresses plus a person without an e-mail address or with an invalid e-mail address.

Create a new email. Choose your Group as recipient. Send. You get an error saying something like “mail could not be sent using server xyz, etc”. It doesn’t tell you the real reason why the email couldn’t be sent. It should.

Problem: a Group in the Address Book might consist of people and companies with and without e-mail addresses. This group might be used for sending letters, faxes and e-mail. Mail.app should handle such a recipient list intelligently.

Solution: Mail.app should inform the user about missing and invalid e-mail addresses and should give the user a choice whether to send the mail to the recipients with correct e-mail addresses or not. If you do send, it should give the user a list of people and companies that have no or invalid e-mail addresses and that were therefore excluded.

He’s right. This is not the behaviour of an Operating System that “just works”.address book, mail.app, apple mail, groups, error message, invalid email addresses, bugs

The writer at gnegg posts a long and pained description of his experience with Mail.app’s IMAP implementation.

Although he likes lots of things about Mail, he also notes some well-known IMAP frustrations, and then adds,

Even worse: Mail.app does not send an IMAP move command to move the messages to the trash (or just mark them as deleted). It actually manually copies the messages over! Message by Message. From the local copy to the server. Then it deletes them. And then begins the awful “Writing Changes to disk”, completely killing the performance of my MacBook.

His conclusion — “Mail.app is perfect for reading and writing your daily mail. It fails miserably at all mail administration jobs” — sees him using Mail for reading and writing, but keeping a copy of Thunderbird for all the mail admin tasks that he wants to perform.mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, IMAP, bugs, tips

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