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Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

annoying.technology

141–150 of 178 posts

Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#142
Another Mail issue I have: if one mail message is highlighted and then I click another and type command-R to reply, the email reply will be to the message that is no longer selected. Sometimes I’ll get a notification of a new email, go to click and send a quick reply (“ok great”), and I’ll have sent the email before I realize that it’s going to the wrong recipient.

It seems crazy to me that the order of operations can be messed up like this. First I clicked, then I command-R’d. Why would Mail handle these commands out of order?

Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#143

I've had this issue for the past 2–3 years. It seems to happen because of improper error handling. If you look closely at the app in the instant it opens, your affected account will have a “disconnected” symbol next to it in the sidebar. However, it goes away before an error can be shown. My theory is: there is a momentary connection issue with these G Suite accounts, and Mail.app starts to show an error by focusing…

It boggles the mind that this issue hasn't been found and fixed by now.

Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#144

Where I work we don’t allow Apple Mail to run on corporate computers. IT rolled out mandatory endpoint protection once, and they started getting reports of malware living in the Mail storage folder. Apparently when employees synced their corporate Gmail to Apple Mail, Apple Mail was pulling down the malicious/suspicious attachments from the Google spam folder. So I figure that’s a good reason why physical mail client…

Malware doesn’t harm your computer just by sitting around on the disk.

Until someone finds a buffer overflow in Apple Mail MIME handling or some such.

Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#145

I've had this issue for the past 2–3 years. It seems to happen because of improper error handling. If you look closely at the app in the instant it opens, your affected account will have a “disconnected” symbol next to it in the sidebar. However, it goes away before an error can be shown. My theory is: there is a momentary connection issue with these G Suite accounts, and Mail.app starts to show an error by focusing…

In my experience, if you always hide the Mail window (cmd-h) instead of closing it (cmd-w), it won't ever pop back up. Takes a while to retrain the muscle memory though! I haven't tested this in Catalina, but it definitely works consistently in Mojave.

This issue has been a real nuisance for at least 5 years and I could never retrain myself. One solution that worked for me was to make it full screen with its own Space.

Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#147

I've had this issue for the past 2–3 years. It seems to happen because of improper error handling. If you look closely at the app in the instant it opens, your affected account will have a “disconnected” symbol next to it in the sidebar. However, it goes away before an error can be shown. My theory is: there is a momentary connection issue with these G Suite accounts, and Mail.app starts to show an error by focusing…

Might be a "dogfooding it" sort of thing, where if apple employees could use google mail accounts, it might have a higher chance of being caught.

I would bet you couldn't use gmail from within the apple campus.

Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#148

I've had this issue for the past 2–3 years. It seems to happen because of improper error handling. If you look closely at the app in the instant it opens, your affected account will have a “disconnected” symbol next to it in the sidebar. However, it goes away before an error can be shown. My theory is: there is a momentary connection issue with these G Suite accounts, and Mail.app starts to show an error by focusing…

Solidly on Linux Mint now but back in the day when wrangling MacOS I used Hammerspoon to fix these sort of issues - should be doable to monitor and enforce the background status of Mail.app and then pause the monitoring when invoked by user (easiest thing would likely be to set hotkey that then also pauses monitoring), and finally resume monitoring when Mail.app goes to background (i.e. user done with active interact…

That is an interesting name for a tool. wonder where it came from?

Re: Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS

#150
post #49
post #2

My workaround for this issue is to put Mail app in its own dedicated Space/Desktop. Then it only comes to the front in its own Space, not in the Space I'm normally using.

I've switched back to a new MacBook, temporarily due to COVID as it was easy to purchase from Apple and it was an emergency. I used OS X fulltime 2006-11. I'm surprised how buggy Catalina is, including Mail.app. I have had serious firmware issues too, such as needing to reset my SMC very frequently because my USB C stops charging the machine every other day. Apple is clearly, sadly, neglecting mac OS. Surprisingly, I…

Have you run into the mail deleting bug yet? That's what is holding me back from upgrading.
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