141–150 of 163 posts
I've been reading about IMAP for more than a decade and I keep hearing about how hard it is to get right, for both the client and the server. I've wondered why this is. Is the standard too complicated? Is it written in way that allows for too much interpretation?
Have you reproduced this problem yourselves? It sounds like you've seen it with exactly one user so far, whom you've not been able to contact. This strikes me as something that could just as easily be due to a pathological set of rules one user created.
Also lots of users, developers or not, have been using the betas recently. I'm no mail server expert, but I don't understand OP's conclusion, that ALL Mail.app clients are faulty.
Not showing folders that exist on the server, that's super confusing.
Checkboxes that don't work - well, that's a common preferences bug - auto-turning-back-on of settings.
And not testing that you're copying to the folder that you've selected, that's a rookie mistake. Any software which makes changes to another machine over the internet should be checking that it's not causing an infinite loop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know at least 2 people plus myself who have the very same problem with Gmail IMAP and new Mail.app.
Gmail is a worse offender of the IMAP protocol than Apple Mail.app has ever been.
> 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.
There's a difference between message contents and meta-data. Even the logs often contain the subject, folder, and TO/FROM frields. It is pretty hard to diagnose issues without at least gathering basic information on the state of an account. Not really sure I see the issue. If Google, for example, had an issue and they needed to examine the meta data surrounding individual pieces of my email I'd likely be alright with…
The 4 million message 32 bit limit of the UID field... Maybe I don't know how mail works, but shouldn't that be 4 billion? I imagine disk space would become an issue before a 32 bit identifier became an issue.
Yes, I noticed that too. I assume this was a brain fart on the part of the OP---2^32 is definitely 4 billion, not 4 million. (Well, approximately.)
(we do have a testing account with top-bit UIDs and MODSEQs set to make sure nothing is trying to do signed maths with them)
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 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.
He's referring to telemetry (logging). It's like an Apache log. Nothing to be uneasy about.
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 think Trojitá http://trojita.flaska.net/ has recently crossed the line from being a promising project to being a useful MUA. It has quite a good IMAP implementation.
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…
Google and MS are the evil! Apple shit just works. Etc.
I would very much appreciate an iOS 7 stripping of Mail.app. I've developed this aversion to opening up the app, and if I do by accident, it's a panicked scramble to quit. It's bloated and clunky. I would consistently get connection errors, it would randomly decide to re-sync all of my mail attachments, and more. I've been on Sparrow for a year or so now and have had zero problems. It's funny, across all of my Apple…
In Settings > Mail, Contacts & Calendars, there's a section called ACCOUNTS. Click on all of them and turn "Mail" off. This way you'll still get everything else in Calendars, Contacts, et. al., but when Mail.app opens it will be empty.
I use the Gmail app for most of my mail and Mail for work Exchange. I've caught myself multiple times inadvertently trying to send a funny article using work email. Ugh.