Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

mjtsai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 131 posts

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#51

Post by ganitarashid »

njhaveri wrote: post #22
ganitarashid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never figured out how to force Apple Mail to download ALL attachments. How do I do this? In my experience it never downloads ALL of them and when you’re offline and click on a very old message it will not have the attachment unless you go online.

You can set this preference by going to the Mail menu > Preferences > Accounts. Select the account you want to adjust on the left, and in the first "Account Information" tab, there should be a pop-up for Download Attachments: [All, Recent, None]. The default for newly added accounts is "Recent".

Like the other comment says, this does not work, unfortunately. It’s supposed to work but it does not, and I’ve easily verified this.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#52

Post by sroussey »

xattt wrote: post #37
thelittleone wrote: post #36

The position of Apple today reminds me a lot of Microsoft after they peaked (~2000?). Cocky to the point of arrogance because of market position, past innovations and brand loyalty (e.g., it is cool to own Apple). But loyalty and market sentiment can only endure so much amidst plummeting product quality, nonsensical pricing (e.g. dongles) and lack of any meaningful innovation (thinner doesn't count). Apple doesn't li…

The Mail app in Leopard had a bug that would spam recipients with copies of drafts as they were typed and saved automatically by the app. Not an apologist, but showstopper bugs were a thing even under Jobs.

Yeah, I hit a bug where it deleted my contacts and then synced the deletions across devices. :(

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#53

Post by segmondy »

I have earned many thumbs down on the net for saying that Apple can't write software for shit. Apple is a design company, they make nice hardware, nice really looking hardware and sometimes performing hardware. That's it, a nice hardware design company. There software is straight up garbage and has been for a long time. Just as I have always been suspicious of those whose main OS is windows and they are not writing native windows app, I'm suspicious of those who use Apple if there full time job is not developing iOS apps. I do own a used Mac mini I bought a few years ago for the solo purpose of developing iOS apps. First time I ever upgraded it after being annoyed to death, it trashed the system and I had to do a fresh reinstall.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#54

Post by atmosx »

It’s a good idea to create a bootable backup and come up with a clean install of macOS with each major release. Every time I updated the existing system straight up, I had minor or major issues solved by a clean install.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#55

Post by userbinator »

herpderperator wrote: post #40

I always find it strange when OS updates affect apps in this way. It just shouldn't happen. It reminds me of when Linus preaches that "the kernel should never break userspace". Why would a OS update suddenly cause the Mail app -- developed by the same company as the OS, for what it's worth -- to have these strange (and catastrophic) data syncing issues? And, just to add, I am tired of OS updates updating and/or relea…

The new OS comes with new versions of apps, and that's usually fine because they're either fixed bugs or added features; the main problem is Apple's internal culture that seems to be preaching "change is good, constant change is always good" --- as I explained in this comment I made a few days ago, the love of constant massive internal changes to their code always tends to cause such bugs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21174947

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#56

Post by userbinator »

reaperducer wrote: post #42

I wish I only lost mail data in the upgrade to Catalina. I lost 400GB of data when the installer repartitioned the hard drive and the files that were in folders in root went bye bye. I know I'm not supposed to put stuff there, but it was a family video project I was putting together for my wife for Christmas, and she would have seen it anywhere else. There should have at least been a notice or a warning or some kind…

If you can reproduce this (I suggest using a VM, they're perfect for this sort of thing), it would be great to write it up as an article and get more visibility on it, because removing files that it did not put there is a really really serious bug.

Microsoft suspended an update after reports of data loss, and was still severely chatised for doing it (explicitly deleting files it did not create without asking permission first): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139

I'm a long-time Windows user, have put files in the roots of drives (maybe this is not such a common thing for Mac users to do, but nonetheless the OS should not assume...), and have never had any OS upgrade remove them. It would be interesting to see what, if anything, Apple will do in response.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#57

Post by greggman2 »

thelittleone wrote: post #36

The position of Apple today reminds me a lot of Microsoft after they peaked (~2000?). Cocky to the point of arrogance because of market position, past innovations and brand loyalty (e.g., it is cool to own Apple). But loyalty and market sentiment can only endure so much amidst plummeting product quality, nonsensical pricing (e.g. dongles) and lack of any meaningful innovation (thinner doesn't count). Apple doesn't li…

What's thin at Apple? They aren't the thinest by a long shot now a days. They aren't the lightest. They aren't the most powerful. There was a time when a Macbook Air was kind of thin and light compared to other laptops. Now it's neither by comparison to the competition. Plenty of thinner lighter more powerful laptops. iPhone nor iPad is also not even remotely the thinest. There was also a time when a Macbook Pro was a top end laptop. That's long not been the case, in particular the underpowered GPU. I own them all but am tired of waiting for Apple to lead again.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#58

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

herpderperator wrote: post #40

I always find it strange when OS updates affect apps in this way. It just shouldn't happen. It reminds me of when Linus preaches that "the kernel should never break userspace". Why would a OS update suddenly cause the Mail app -- developed by the same company as the OS, for what it's worth -- to have these strange (and catastrophic) data syncing issues? And, just to add, I am tired of OS updates updating and/or relea…

> I always find it strange when OS updates affect apps in this way. It just shouldn't happen.

Right? Are there not automated tests for this stuff? I would expect that if you commit something that causes this, the next day you get an email that says, "your name is on commit $FOO, which caused regression tests to fail in tests/firstparty/apps/mail; please fix it (sincerely, Jenkins)" or so. Heck, it's more egregious here because it's a first party application, but it seems like it would be in their interest to keep copies of the most popular third-party applications and include those in their test suites as well. ("Hi, Adobe? Hey, it's Apple. Hey, so this is a heads up that Photoshop doesn't work with the new OS version; we're sending you a RCA so you can fix it before it hits end users.")

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#59

Post by jdjdjjsjs »

geerlingguy wrote: post #9
ggregoire wrote: post #6

Why do people use Mail? (genuine question)

It's very fast (native app), it supports practically every type of mail account ever, everything can be stored locally (great for offline batch processing of emails), and there are keyboard shortcuts for everything. It takes a bit of customization to get a layout that works nicely for my workflow (I use the classic layout). There are a bunch of other 'efficient' mail apps, but if you just need basic features and don'…

I don't know if it's still true, but until about Snow Leopard I could have a smooth keyboard driven experience that completely aligned with other apps such as NetNewsWire.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#60

Post by pcr910303 »

As a daily Mac user who started to use macOS (OS X) about 7-8 years ago, I find the insurmountable number of bugs of macOS Catalina alarming. Don’t get me wrong, the situation is still much, much compared to Windows or Linux[0], buy it is alarming to see the general quality of macOS software to decrease.

I personally think it’s due to Apple engineers trying to do so much; I remember being impressed by the number of new features and changes introduced this year while watching the WWDC, but it looks like Apple couldn’t keep up its own enthusiasm.

Project Catalyst was poorly executed; I was disappointed that Catalyst doesn’t default to ‘HIG-respecting’ AppKit controls that correspond well with the UIKit equivalents (so that modal form sheets in UIKit are translated into floating windows, e.g.), and the inability to mix in AppKit controls and UIKit ones into the same view hierarchy (NSColorWell or NSPopUpButton doesn’t have UIKit equivalents), e.g.

SwiftUI is great in theory, but the tooling is immature, it’s not available to write any decently complex apps with them.

The iCloud changes were reverted right before Catalina’s release; looks like the iCloud team didn’t have enough manpower to fix all the bugs until the release.

It’s concerning, as one of the premise of macOS was that it works as expected, though that now the newly introduced parts doesn’t. I’m expecting a stabilizing release for macOS 10.16 akin to the stone-stable 10.14 Mojave, but I don’t remember 10.13 High Sierra to be unstable like this one.

[0]: For Linux users who don’t agree with this: I’ve never set up a Linux desktop system with all the hardware working without doing any ‘geek’ stuff like running some shell commands. And no, the fact that Apple only allows to use macOS only on its own computers isn’t an excuse. And no, even on well supported laptops like the ThinkPad, there are a furious amount of bugs that need ‘configuring’

Post reply on HN