François Joseph de Kermadec, who posts on the O’Reilly MacDevCenter site, got quite a fright from Mail.app today:

Today, Mail went postal (hmm, do I chalk up that one as a bad pun or coincidental wording?) on me. Deleting a message would make it reappear. Moving anything would duplicate it. Corruption crept everywhere, in subtle ways. Nothing was really reproducible but nothing was totally random either. In other words, hell.

As a result, he is giving up on Mail with a mixture of anxiety and hope.

The rest of his post is an interesting tour through the innards of Mail.app’s Mail folder, weighing the good and bad things about its organisation and arguing that the app’s development has brought about too much complexity:

To me, Mail’s facade is the best of all Mac OS X applications out there. The way it thinks about mails, the way organizes them. But looking into its Mail folder just shows how it has evolved and, more importantly, how dramatically it did, with no signs of slowing down. Too much in too little time, really. For example, should a crucial application like an email client rely on the first version of system-wide frameworks (I’m thinking Spotlight here)? Should an application take it upon itself to create an SSL-capable account automatically upon first startup without turning SSL on and without giving the user a chance to stop sending the password in the clear (.Mac indeed)?

He’s not sure what client to switch to. And there’s the rub. For all its quirks, it’s hard to beat Mail.app as the most satisfying email client out there. Not least, the control it gives to users through an abundance of plugins is unparalleled.

He’ll be back.