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

Fastmail, the email service that I use and happily recommend, posted two IMAP bugs in Thunderbird on its blog today:

1. Thunderbird does not set or recognise the /Draft flag on messages saved in IMAP folders. (Bugzilla report.)
2. Thunderbird has big problems handling large attachments saved in messages on IMAP servers. (Report on bleedingedge.com.au and partial fix.)

I post this simply to raise my own morale and the morale of other Mail.app users with IMAP accounts. We do not suffer alone.

MacDevCenter has a tutorial on getting Apple Mail, Fastmail and mutt to work together.

Two of these are my favourite things, and I am learning to fool around with the third.

Also helpful for novice mutters, are this tip on mutt and Address Book from macOSXHints and “Mutt Nirvana”, a list of mutt tutorials and hints. The page is in Italian, but most of the links lead to English resources.