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Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

annoying.technology

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Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#31

Post by strogonoff »

st3fan wrote: post #19
ornornor wrote: post #14

Apple Mail is riddled with bugs it’s unusable. Do yourself a favor and switch. Anything else is better than it, Thunderbird is a pretty good alternative imo. It feels like apple doesn’t put any care into regression bugs in their applications. It’s the same on the iPhone, Mail is so bad that I uninstalled it in favor of outlook (the irony...) —Mail was sucking so much battery that my phone wouldn’t last 8h. With outlo…

> Apple Mail is riddled with bugs it’s unusable. Weird, I've been using it for a decade and I have zero issues. Maybe 'unusable' is a pretty subjective assessment?

I have been using Mail for many years. Like OP, I have Gmail on own domain (in my case it’s the old personal G Suite offering). Additionally, I have a regular Gmail account and iCloud’s built-in email. Like OP, I did a clean install when Catalina came out (got a new laptop around that time).

As far as I’m concerned, Mail is one of those things that consistently just works. The only issue I used to have was quirky undo/redo of archivals/deletions, which I believe had to do with Gmail’s IMAP servers and/or the way Mail talks to them, but I am not noticing that lately.

If I were OP, I’d consider again whether third-party software that they and their coworkers have in common is wreaking havoc here. If there’s no such software or the issue manifests itself on a clean system without any third-party apps at all, then this Heisenbug should probably on Apple’s Radar…

Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#32

Post by threeseed »

chrisseaton wrote: post #6
threeseed wrote: post #4

Please make sure to log this at http://bugreporter.apple.com Your bug will at least then be triaged and acknowledged.

> Your bug will at least then be triaged and acknowledged. Lol sure it will.

Bugreporter is just a front end for Radar.

And I can assure that when I was working at Apple bugs were triaged and acknowledged by a PM. Doesn’t mean they get fixed though.

Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#33

Post by jdk »

ancarda wrote: post #3

I get something like this with Music.app -- it seems to randomly open. I suspect it's some kind of keystroke (i.e. hitting the play button) but I haven't figured out exactly why it's happening or how to stop it. I'm pretty sure this didn't used to happen until I upgraded to Catalina. I really wish I had better luck with Linux...

I get this semi-randomly when I'm using my bluetooth headphones/mic with Meet/Discord and then quit/close it and it becomes available to the OS or something. Music.app just pops up and as far as I can tell, there's no way to turn it off.

Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#34

Post by andreasley »

orloffm wrote: post #28
st3fan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple Mail is riddled with bugs it’s unusable. Weird, I've been using it for a decade and I have zero issues. Maybe 'unusable' is a pretty subjective assessment?

If people keep alligators at home, and some are eaten by them, the assessment of them being unsuitable for pets is not subjective.

It depends on the percentage. Dogs are considered suitable pets, despite some owners being mauled.

Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#35

Post by threeseed »

chrisseaton wrote: post #26
Austin_Conlon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't say for Mail, but in my experience watchOS and SwiftUI reports are frequently acknowledged.

Apple definitely has a history of not acknowledging for a long time major problems that many people can clearly demonstrate. Bend gate, antenna gate, stage light gate, that thing with the coating on the screens...

Bend date, antenna gate were fixed in the next revision of their hardware. Screen coating was fixed I believe even quicker.

There is a limit to how quickly Apple can fix hardware given they have to work with third parties on retooling and retraining.

Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#38

Post by thiht »

ornornor wrote: post #14

Apple Mail is riddled with bugs it’s unusable. Do yourself a favor and switch. Anything else is better than it, Thunderbird is a pretty good alternative imo. It feels like apple doesn’t put any care into regression bugs in their applications. It’s the same on the iPhone, Mail is so bad that I uninstalled it in favor of outlook (the irony...) —Mail was sucking so much battery that my phone wouldn’t last 8h. With outlo…

Same here. I like using Apple programs on OSX because they're pretty well integrated, but Apple Mail is the exception.

Random crashes, sudden 100% CPU or memory usage... It sometimes just stops receiving mails altogether.

Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#39

Post by threeseed »

4ad wrote: post #11
threeseed wrote: post #4

Please make sure to log this at http://bugreporter.apple.com Your bug will at least then be triaged and acknowledged.

Apple bug tracker is so frustrating. They take forever to answer, and ask for things that you have already provided in your original issue. When you try to reproduce the bug on multiple versions, they close your bug if you reproduced it on beta versions, because beta versions are unsupported, even though the bug affects release versions. Sometimes this happens even if they asked you to try the beta version! The bugs…

You can’t see other people’s bug reports because they often contain screenshots or telemetry data which is confidential.

And I believe the way Apple works is to look through Radar for important/widespread bugs, mark them for fixing in the next release, fix them and then ask you to retest. They aren’t just going through and fixing Radar’s one by one. Hence you get that frustrating experience where it looks like the bug is being ignored.

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