Have you reproduced this problem yourselves? It sounds like you've seen it with exactly one user so far, whom you've not been able to contact. This strikes me as something that could just as easily be due to a pathological set of rules one user created.
Email is always a bitch. Google's implementation of IMAP is a disaster as well. I have yet to find any email app on any platform that I can't swear at daily. I even tried to write my own before sanity returned.
GMail's IMAP server actually works well... it just violates the spec in several obnoxious ways.
For Inky (http://inky.com) we had to devote a bunch of Gimap-specific effort into explicitly syncing flags, for example, because Gimap simply doesn't notify clients of flag changes. Inky has to poll Gimap for flag changes rather than passively learning about them via IMAP IDLE.
And the treatment of labels as folders is a mess for IMAP clients, as is the All Mail folder, which -- if not handled properly -- effectively generates a duplicate of every message in every folder.
But Gimap does work reliably in our experience. It's a bit slow, but it's less broken than IMAP servers run by other major providers (who shall remain nameless).
I would very much appreciate an iOS 7 stripping of Mail.app. I've developed this aversion to opening up the app, and if I do by accident, it's a panicked scramble to quit. It's bloated and clunky. I would consistently get connection errors, it would randomly decide to re-sync all of my mail attachments, and more. I've been on Sparrow for a year or so now and have had zero problems. It's funny, across all of my Apple devices, I don't use any of the native mail apps for one reason or another. On iOS, I use Mailbox.
I think it's one user with a fucked up mailbox rule that copies stuff around or something like that. Apple also runs iCloud mail servers on IMAP, I think they would catch that if it was a widespread issue on betas.
Since the previews, I have not been able to archive emails for Gmail accounts or Google Apps for Business. A subset of mails archived directly on Gmail will appear and stay in Mail's Inbox. I'm not sure where the developers for Mail went to that they didn't have the resources to fix it. Maybe to help with the iOS 7 crunch?
We actually have some evidence to suggest that we've picked up a few customers leaving Gmail because of this problem. Which is nice, but now we have to deal with a different bug. Nobody is safe from Mail.app! ;)
This is good news: it seems as if Apple's quality control is improving. After all, there is no report here of Mail.app actually deleting messages[0] [EDIT: oh, well] or sending out hundreds of copies of a message.[1]
Despite this improvement, however, I think I shall continue to avoid this company's software in favor of more mature, open source solutions.[2]
[0]http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12758081&tstart=0
[1]http://lee-phillips.org/iphoneUpgradeWarning-4-2-1/
[2]http://www.mutt.org/ (http://www.washington.edu/alpine/ might be OK, too.)
To me it seems like QA is declining. I just experienced data loss with the new Mail.app 7.0: Moving mails out of inbox to another folder left a copy in the inbox. Deleting the copy in the inbox also irrevocably deleted the other copy in the other folder. Smart mailboxes just don't work properly, doesn't auto-refresh, incorrect non-refreshing or just plain random "unread email count" badges, table column "Mailbox" shows "Archive" no matter which folder a mail actually belongs to, random 100% cpu usage for extended periods of time even when left idle, etc. etc. etc.
The old version that shipped with 10.8.5 had none of these problem at all. Mail.app went from being perfect to being actively hostile :(
The 4 million message 32 bit limit of the UID field...
Maybe I don't know how mail works, but shouldn't that be 4 billion? I imagine disk space would become an issue before a 32 bit identifier became an issue.
I find Mail.app to be OK now. The only think I am missing (and my main gripe) is strict threading. I just hate receiving my daily Google remainder (or lack thereof) and seeing the long list of previous emails with same subject associated on the same thread. Hate it!
Does anyone knows if there is a way to get strict threading —without changing the client?
I've been reading about IMAP for more than a decade and I keep hearing about how hard it is to get right, for both the client and the server. I've wondered why this is. Is the standard too complicated? Is it written in way that allows for too much interpretation?
Someone suggested http://airmailapp.com/ as a replacement email app for OSX in a recent HN thread and I've been very happy with it. Only downside so far is it doesn't have outlook contact integration, so you don't get autocomplete for all the email addresses in your company unlike microsoft outlook. Which is too bad, because airmail + apple calendar is much faster than microsoft outlook.
If you're sick of the mail program that comes with your OS, try Inky (http://inky.com). It's still in beta, but we just put out a refreshed version that fixes a lot of issues users reported throughout 2013. Lots of polishing work still remains, but we're happily dog-fooding it and have a loyal following around the world. (And yes, Linux guys, we're still planning to release a version for Ubuntu -- finally.)
Inky is a clean-sheet mail client implementation written with Python and Chrome Embedded Framework. It's taken us several years to get it to this beta stage; give it a try and let us know your thoughts at <[email protected]>. It's currently free; we'll likely offer upsell freemium versions at some point, once we're satisfied with it.
1) I have to log in to your service. Why? Makes me think you're storing my mail credentials on your server. If it's a cloud sync issue, use Dropbox/iCloud.
2) Doesn't use my Contacts in To: field. This makes it a non-starter for me.
It does look pretty, I think the filtering is very smart, and I like the "smart cards".
Inky is an excellent client. I tried+reviewed the first version released on HN about a year(?) ago and it was quite solid and well-engineered. If I weren't already happy with my notmuch/emacs setup, I would switch close to immediately.
I'm super interested -- do you guys offer notifications/setting reminders on messages for later (like Mailbox.app)? I really need that, because I'm disorganized and forgetful and it saves my ass constantly.
sigh I really miss the good ol' days of e-mail, before all these Web 2.0 people hit the scene with their "let us scan your mail for other addresses" this and their "we'll keep a safe copy of your email as a backup, using IMAP" that ..
Frankly, though, I blame MS Outlook. When it hit the scene, email became a thorny mess of standards, almost-standards, and not-standard at all .. and it seems the rest of the industry is quite happy following that disastrous path to oblivion set out for us with the MS Outlook/Exchange competition.
I honestly have no clue what you're getting at with your first paragraph. Email hasn't changed very much in the last fifteen or more years, so I'm not sure what changes the "Web 2.0 people" made you're referring to, your examples are pretty odd ("scan other addresses" what?). Also keeping a backup of deleted messages for a period of time is standard industry practice and has been since before I or Linux were even born.
As far as MS Outlook and standards: That little rant reads like it was written about web-browsers and you just replaced "Internet Explorer" with "MS Outlook." MS Outlook uses a fairly standard implementation of IMAP/POP3/SMTP and has since forever. Microsoft have their own ActiveSync mechanism which isn't a standard, but no competing solutions have really appeared which compete with ActiveSync (and replace IMAP) so while you could blame them, you could also blame the complete lack of innovation in this space.
To be fair there was once a mess where e-mail was riddled with issues with charsets, bad MIME implementations, buggy QP-encoded headers and so on. Then there was the spam age. Then the no-client-actually-works age, which is where we are.
So basically on a thread about serious bugs in Apple software, you just blamed Microsoft and Google with some vague statement when they had nothing to do with the particular problems.
Google and MS are the evil! Apple shit just works. Etc.
Absolutely. The sad thing is that Apple seem to be competing with early versions of Outlook to produce the worst, pretty-but-totally-network-hostile clients.
I'm not an iOS user, but doesn't it sound a bit unprofessional for them to write such post on their main blog? Won't it piss off iOS users, who are not responsible for Apple's bad practices?
I think such rants should indeed be made public, but maybe there was a better outlet for FastMail to do that.
Out of curiosity, do you mind explaining why you think it's unprofessional?
> Won't it piss off iOS users, who are not responsible for Apple's bad practices?
In many(most?) services abuse of the service is met with suspension, etc. IMHO this case clearly counts as an abuse of the system regardless of whose fault it is.
I don't blame them. I had a go at implementing an IMAP server once, and it ranks as one of the most frustrating programming experiences I've ever had. The standard is huge, fragmented, and is full of strange requirements to fulfill every thinkable use case a client may have. These small details end up heavily dictating the architecture of your application. I don't see how could implement IMAP without completely throwing out most of your work several times.
To make things worse, there is hardly any way to know when you've done it right. I'm not even sure there is a right way. When you start looking at how actual email clients speak IMAP, you'll see that they all manage to ask for a list of emails in completely different ways. It's a small wonder that these systems appear to work at all.
I think you can still blame them. They're a corporation with a 470B market cap, designing machines for which email is a primary use-case. They employ thousands and thousand of engineers. They should be able to build a mail client. Many much smaller organizations manage alright.
But implementing an IMAP client is vastly easier. Still frustrating, and the IMAP spec is a giant stinking turd, but most of the most horrific things in implementing an IMAP server is down to all the crap you need to support in case some weird client uses it (and one inevitably does), while a client can choose to stick to a very small subset of the spec.
From the comments I draw the conclusion that a solid, open source, GUI e-mail client would have great popularity. Are there such clients out there? I used Thunderbird under Linux but it feels cumbersome.
There is Geary, but I have tried it and it is both lacking in features and pretty buggy. It is quite nice looking however.
Myself I have all but given up on GUI email clients, I still use Thunderbird from time to time but only when I need PGP encrypted email, otherwise I stick to webmail. I am looking forward to Mailpile if it delivers on its goals, looks very promising.
I've searched in vain for an alternative, open or closed, to Mail.app on any platform ever since Mozilla lost its mind and released Thunderbird 3. I can't find anything fast, simple, stable, and maintained. The next best option I've found is, of all things, Outlook (Mac or Windows), not that it's particularly desirable, either.
I think Trojitá http://trojita.flaska.net/ has recently crossed the line from being a promising project to being a useful MUA. It has quite a good IMAP implementation.
I already have too a bug opened to apple due to an incorrect handle of uidl with 0 at left... I opened it like one year ago... Still no answer... This bug is in all ios apple mail clients....
I've generally been happy with Mail.app in Mavericks until yesterday evening when I got a notification center pop-up for a new mail and accidentally clicked the delete option, instead of reply. The email completely and utterly disappeared from the client and the server (google apps imap), wasn't in any Trash or All Mail folder.
It was gone completely based off an errant click on a pop-up notification. Kind of scary.
[+] [-] nknighthb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fredsted|12 years ago|reply
I'm no mail server expert, but I don't understand OP's conclusion, that ALL Mail.app clients are faulty.
[+] [-] coldcode|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmbaggett|12 years ago|reply
For Inky (http://inky.com) we had to devote a bunch of Gimap-specific effort into explicitly syncing flags, for example, because Gimap simply doesn't notify clients of flag changes. Inky has to poll Gimap for flag changes rather than passively learning about them via IMAP IDLE.
And the treatment of labels as folders is a mess for IMAP clients, as is the All Mail folder, which -- if not handled properly -- effectively generates a duplicate of every message in every folder.
But Gimap does work reliably in our experience. It's a bit slow, but it's less broken than IMAP servers run by other major providers (who shall remain nameless).
[+] [-] kyro|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eknkc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hboon|12 years ago|reply
Since the previews, I have not been able to archive emails for Gmail accounts or Google Apps for Business. A subset of mails archived directly on Gmail will appear and stay in Mail's Inbox. I'm not sure where the developers for Mail went to that they didn't have the resources to fix it. Maybe to help with the iOS 7 crunch?
[+] [-] robn_fastmail|12 years ago|reply
We actually have some evidence to suggest that we've picked up a few customers leaving Gmail because of this problem. Which is nice, but now we have to deal with a different bug. Nobody is safe from Mail.app! ;)
[+] [-] rsl7|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricardobeat|12 years ago|reply
Peeking into a user's mail box? I know it's all plain text anyway, but this article makes me feel a bit uneasy.
[+] [-] leephillips|12 years ago|reply
Despite this improvement, however, I think I shall continue to avoid this company's software in favor of more mature, open source solutions.[2]
[+] [-] 0x0|12 years ago|reply
The old version that shipped with 10.8.5 had none of these problem at all. Mail.app went from being perfect to being actively hostile :(
[+] [-] recuter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lagged2Death|12 years ago|reply
Maybe I don't know how mail works, but shouldn't that be 4 billion? I imagine disk space would become an issue before a 32 bit identifier became an issue.
[+] [-] davidcollantes|12 years ago|reply
Does anyone knows if there is a way to get strict threading —without changing the client?
[+] [-] RexRollman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahyarm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apostlion|12 years ago|reply
Also, threading algorithm changed slightly in Mavericks, leading to many more mistakes than ever before.
[+] [-] dmbaggett|12 years ago|reply
Inky is a clean-sheet mail client implementation written with Python and Chrome Embedded Framework. It's taken us several years to get it to this beta stage; give it a try and let us know your thoughts at <[email protected]>. It's currently free; we'll likely offer upsell freemium versions at some point, once we're satisfied with it.
Mail is hard.
[+] [-] bdcravens|12 years ago|reply
1) I have to log in to your service. Why? Makes me think you're storing my mail credentials on your server. If it's a cloud sync issue, use Dropbox/iCloud.
2) Doesn't use my Contacts in To: field. This makes it a non-starter for me.
It does look pretty, I think the filtering is very smart, and I like the "smart cards".
[+] [-] porker|12 years ago|reply
That's false FUD.
[+] [-] MAGZine|12 years ago|reply
Will definitely check this out and pass along any relevant feedback.
[+] [-] gcr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w4|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buster|12 years ago|reply
Does Inky support this?
Edit: Also, i am wondering what inky's business model is? Will the client cost money in the future? Ads?[+] [-] ifcho|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] songgao|12 years ago|reply
EDIT: also why a .pkg with password requirement instead of a simple .app ?
[+] [-] mistermann|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] farslan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fit2rule|12 years ago|reply
Frankly, though, I blame MS Outlook. When it hit the scene, email became a thorny mess of standards, almost-standards, and not-standard at all .. and it seems the rest of the industry is quite happy following that disastrous path to oblivion set out for us with the MS Outlook/Exchange competition.
[+] [-] UnoriginalGuy|12 years ago|reply
As far as MS Outlook and standards: That little rant reads like it was written about web-browsers and you just replaced "Internet Explorer" with "MS Outlook." MS Outlook uses a fairly standard implementation of IMAP/POP3/SMTP and has since forever. Microsoft have their own ActiveSync mechanism which isn't a standard, but no competing solutions have really appeared which compete with ActiveSync (and replace IMAP) so while you could blame them, you could also blame the complete lack of innovation in this space.
[+] [-] zorked|12 years ago|reply
I don't think email ever worked well.
[+] [-] dirkgently|12 years ago|reply
Google and MS are the evil! Apple shit just works. Etc.
[+] [-] brongondwana|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lakwn|12 years ago|reply
I think such rants should indeed be made public, but maybe there was a better outlet for FastMail to do that.
[+] [-] a-nom-a-ly|12 years ago|reply
> Won't it piss off iOS users, who are not responsible for Apple's bad practices?
In many(most?) services abuse of the service is met with suspension, etc. IMHO this case clearly counts as an abuse of the system regardless of whose fault it is.
[+] [-] dmak|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lars|12 years ago|reply
To make things worse, there is hardly any way to know when you've done it right. I'm not even sure there is a right way. When you start looking at how actual email clients speak IMAP, you'll see that they all manage to ask for a list of emails in completely different ways. It's a small wonder that these systems appear to work at all.
[+] [-] cmyr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] da_n|12 years ago|reply
Myself I have all but given up on GUI email clients, I still use Thunderbird from time to time but only when I need PGP encrypted email, otherwise I stick to webmail. I am looking forward to Mailpile if it delivers on its goals, looks very promising.
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-bac...
[+] [-] __david__|12 years ago|reply
To me, Thunderbird + Nostalgy + Enigmail + Colored Diffs = bliss.
[+] [-] nknighthb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiml|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricardobeat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ramattack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ramattack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] look_lookatme|12 years ago|reply
It was gone completely based off an errant click on a pop-up notification. Kind of scary.
[+] [-] msie|12 years ago|reply