41–50 of 163 posts
> I discovered my second attempt to contact the user about this problem in their Junk folder tonight. Peeking into a user's mail box? I know it's all plain text anyway, but this article makes me feel a bit uneasy.
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 throw…
> I discovered my second attempt to contact the user about this problem in their Junk folder tonight. Peeking into a user's mail box? I know it's all plain text anyway, but this article makes me feel a bit uneasy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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" sho…
The QA failure most shocking to me lately is that on 10.8.5 on their newest MacBook Airs, Apple forgot some file necessary to use the video camera in 32 bit mode and therefore broke Skype. Microsoft, for all their faults, is notorious for having fantastic QA and not breaking old apps when they update Windows, and would never have let that happen. You'd think when you update the camera that you'd check such a popular…
Windows 8.1 has had a number of severe problems.[1][2][3]
[1] http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2013/10/21/win-rt-81-pulle...
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2013/10/17/windows-8-...
[3] Anecdotally, a coworker tried upgrading on two separate devices (after Microsoft pulled 8.1 for awhile and then made it available again). On both it installed fine but disabled all of his Metro apps from starting.
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 throw…
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.
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 throw…
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.
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.
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 i…
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 bor…
This wasn't really an issue pre-Web2.0. But now with all the effort to construct billion dollar social networks, its quite a common thing for people to just hand over the keys to their email and ignore the risks.
Back in the 80's and 90's, your email password wasn't something you ever shared. Nowadays, its almost like the other way around.
Oh .. as for your criticism of my 'rant', well I suppose I could also finger GMail for the mess that email is in these days ..
Unfortunately Microsoft is still the old Microsoft.
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 i…
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. I don't think email ever worked well.