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…
Yep, that's exactly it.
The author's assessment is incorrect btw, this happened to me frequently for years on a computer without any G suite accounts. On a High Sierra machine fwiw.
The reason is that Mail thinks the mail server is unreachable, so it brings the window to front, but then magically it changes idea and the mail server is reachable again ️.
In general I find macOS handles alerting the user very poorly. I don't know why but it infuriates me when icons bounce on the dock for attention. The animation is too insistent for whatever trivial thing the app wants to let me know. Or an app will open some Important Dialog Box that I need to deal with, except it's hidden behind some other windows somewhere and the rest of the app refuses to respond to my clicks unt…
Yeah, that's not good. Sometimes you can find it through some combination of ensuring that app is frontmost by clicking its icon in the dock, choosing "hide others" from its menu, and triggering "show application windows" in Mission Control (often ctrl-down-arrow, or a three-finger down-swipe trackpad gesture).
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…
You are right. This has been going on for a few years, and it is related to the need for the app to display the connection error.
I find myself quitting mail when I want to be in the zone because otherwise this random behaviour is really annoying.
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 bu…
I wish that was how it worked, but my experience has been more like the parent poster's: long-standing easily reproducible bugs never fixed despite multiple reports and multiple major releases. I've never once been informed by Apple of a bug I submitted being fixed, or "asked to retest".
Not being able to see the duplicate bug when your case is closed and marked as such feels like a slap in the face. I understand that some material could be confidential, but I would bet over 99% aren't. If someone has spent enough time to determine that my report X is a duplicate of Y, they could also determine if Y is confidential and if so, just flag it in the system to show up as redacted.
How is it that there is still no known root cause for this issue? I suspect there is a way to check what the reason an app came to the foreground is, no?
I hint that the root cause is a stupid design decision. Forcing the app into the front, for whatever reason. Without the means to turn the behaviour off.
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.
> Bend date, antenna gate were fixed in the next revision of their hardware.
I know they were. But do you not remember there was quite a period of time where Apple didn't acknowledge the problems and ignored users trying to triage them?
> There is a limit to how quickly Apple can fix
What has this got to do with it? We're talking about triage and acknowledgement, not fix.
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?
No, it has a lot of memory corruption issues. Try adding another account (or don't if you need the app to keep functioning.)
I don't know if apple just decided to give up on it or what but it's got a lot of bugs that have been left for years.
> 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.
> I can assure that when I was working at Apple bugs were triaged and acknowledged
As a counterexample, as late as 2018 Apple was publicly denying (so not acknowledging and ignoring attempts at triage) bendgate, but leaked documents show they knew about it in 2014.