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

Not many people know this (I didn’t) but .Mac has an official blog .

The most recent entry, “Using .Mac mail as your everywhere notebook” , points out that you can easily use an IMAP account like .Mac to store information online that is then accessible from any computer anywhere.

A Joyent user, Matt, has discovered the same thing. In a long and entertaining post on Joyent’s forums, he describes an epiphany which led him to dump his information manager and use an IMAP account instead:

So now that I’m using a folder on my IMAP server to store things like directions to that restaurant or my car insurance account number, I can shed one extraneous app, and everything is as searchable and sortable as it should be. Assuming I’ve mailed it to myself, I can find whatever document I need from home, from the office, and from someone else’s computer.

He still has to use Mail.app to search the content of his messages, but for the most part he is much happier in a more Web 2.0 world.dotmac, .mac, IMAP, email, information manager, joyent, web 2.0

Steve Borsch posts a list of 907 Web 2.0 links and ponders what he considers a central problem of the web 2.0 phenomenon:

I can’t even get through a list of 907 links like this one…let alone decide upon who will survive and be worthy of my attention…. which of the collaboration sites can I either use or recommend to clients (e.g., Basecamp, Foldera, Joyent, Rallypoint, ProjectSpaces, StikiPad, et al) will still be with us a year or two from now?

Bouncing off that post, Working Pathways suggests that the lack of integration between Web 2.0 services and users’ computers is another weakness:

Some client-level integration with the customer’s machine increases productivity, usability, and usefulness. I’ve just signed up with Joyent and was disappointed to find out I couldn’t connect their calendar, email, address book, and files to my local versions.

The support costs are therefore cheaper for Web 2.0 companies, he argues, but this lack of integration leaves him exposed to server downtimes and the inability to get at his data without an Internet connection.

He uses Mail.app and NetNewsWire instead of the hosted versions for just this reason.web 2.0, Basecamp, Foldera, Joyent, Rallypoint, mail.app, apple mail, productivity, Internet, links