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Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

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Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#71

Post by jquery »

My iCloud backup, with years of data, including apps which only had local storage, was completely borked when I upgraded to iOS 13 (on my iPhone XS). My phone would enter a boot loop during the iCloud restore process, and I tried 15 different restores (different iOS 13 versions including beta versions, iTunes backups, a couple different types of restores they have at the Genius Bar, a direct phone-to-phone restore, curating my iCloud backup with only the most important apps, etc). None of them worked, all ended in a boot loop. Apple Support basically gave up on me, telling me my "backup was corrupted".

In the end I had to start with a fresh iOS install, which was very disappointing, as my years of accumulated app data were lost. I manually backed up what I could, but some apps had their data lost forever, and I wasted many hours of time.

Very disappointing.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#72

Post by kccqzy »

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…

You have a very outdated vision of what constitutes an OS. (Or perhaps a very Linux-centric vision.) Nowadays an OS is far more than just a kernel. It's the associated userland libraries, frameworks, and basic utilities. And yes, the scope of these basic utilities have expanded far beyond just shell-utilities like sh or cat; they now include things like a graphical mail client.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#74

Post by microtonal »

kccqzy wrote: post #72
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…

You have a very outdated vision of what constitutes an OS. (Or perhaps a very Linux-centric vision.) Nowadays an OS is far more than just a kernel. It's the associated userland libraries, frameworks, and basic utilities. And yes, the scope of these basic utilities have expanded far beyond just shell-utilities like sh or cat; they now include things like a graphical mail client.

How is that a Linux-centric vision? Linux distributions have always tightly coupled application updates to OS (distribution) updates. In fact, this was often a criticism of Linux and one of the motivators for a lean immutable system like Fedora Silverblue, where you install and update applications out-of-band with Flatpak.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#75

Post by nitrogen »

journalctl wrote: post #30
nitrogen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hash tree for email actually seems like a semi-decent idea for verifying integrity of a synced mailbox.

So use a hash function like in the olden days.

The benefit of either a tree or a sequence or hashes is that you could identify where and when the active mailbox differs from the backups. If each message is its own separate file then it's less interesting.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#76

Post by tandav »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #50
geerlingguy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

It’s also so much better for working with massive amounts of mail compared to Gmail and other webmails. In Mail I can work through many tens or hundreds of messages quickly and easily. With Gmail I often feel like I’m jumping through hoops to do the same thing.

A use Mail.app but to be fair. Search in mail.google.com is much faster than in Mail.app (when you have thousands of mails)

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#77

Post by xvector »

segmondy wrote: post #53

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 n…

IMO Apple usually makes good software. That’s why the Catalina release is a big deal.

If Apple made shit software this story would be background noise, but it is surprising to see a company that usually delivers relatively polished experiences do this.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#78

Post by blub »

segmondy wrote: post #53

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 n…

Blaming "the company" for bugs in complex human-machine systems doesn't really say anything insightful, actionable or useful.

Android, Linux, Windows, macOS and iOS are all broken, just in different ways. This is the quality that can be reached for mass-market consumer products with the standard development processes.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#79

Post by a012 »

userbinator wrote: post #55
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.co…

It makes sense now because they said bug is a feature. No surprise.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#80

Post by jbverschoor »

> Moving messages between mailboxes, both via drag-and-drop and AppleScript, can result in a blank message (only headers) on the Mac. If the message was moved to a server mailbox, other devices see the message as deleted. And eventually this syncs back to the first Mac, where the message disappears as well.

Actually this was already a problem on Mohave. I lost all my mail from one mailbox when moving messages from one folder to another (gmail)

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