[Thermo]

My original reply was meant to agree with bigclotis. My intent was to point out that the review of mail was lacking, as bigclotis said. The impression from the review makes Mail seem much better than it actually is.
I mentioned some of the shortcomings with Outlook as a reference because I have used both f these products. I did not mention Thunderbird (as other have) or any other 3rd party apps because I haven't used any other 3 party apps. I'm sure that I would have mentioned other shortcomings in Mail if I had used other apps and hey did things better as well. Outlook isn't perfect and if this was a review on Outlook and it portrayed Outlook as being better than it is, I would be pointing out Outlooks problems - i would mention how you can't create a calendar entry right from an email in Outlook. (However, On a scale of 1 to 10 Mail is a 3 where as Outlook is an 8)
The whole point is that this product was rated 4 out of 5 and the review was too complimentary to the product and did not accurately portray its shortcomings.(If there was a review for Outlook Express that gave it a 4 out of 6, I would lose respect for that reviewer as well) Perhaps the reviewer hasn't used other products so there is no reference to compare it and therefore didn't know where it is lacking. (If this is the case, shame on the reviewer for not doing the research). I'm sure there are other things that other 3rd party apps do better but I have not used them so I don't know them. This is the whole point - the reviewer should be telling me where Mail lacks in comparison to Thinderbird and others.
Bigclotis said he wouldn’t trust a Macworld review after this and although I wouldn’t go that far, I do agree that this was a poor review. Hopefully, future reviews will be more in depth.
Macworld is a great place for information but their reviews of Apple branded products can’t be relied upon. (Reviews for 3rd party apps and hardware for the Mac but not made by Apple are much better)

[mkmcfr]

I will try taking the RSS out of Mail and see what happens. Thanks. It is really unnecessary since I have everything I need with iGoogle. The problem with having everything in the same app is just like all multi-function electronics products: when one function goes down, you're stuck. Give me a mail app for mail, a web browser for RSS and a calendar for my to-do list. It's my calendar I open first every morning because I have such a bad memory... and if you're lucky enough to still have Tiger, stick with it. It worked great with nary a hitch and I regret upgrading to Leopard. It is a mess, nothing but hang-ups, colored balls spinning, Safari crashing. If I could figure out what the heck Time Machine is for, I would like to use it to go back to Tiger! Aperture 2 is fantastic, however. At least they got that right.

[kirkmc]

I'm very surprised by the comments of people who say Mail crashes often. I have Mail open all day long, and I've maybe had two crashes since Leopard (and I can't be sure they weren't from malformed messages).
When writing this review, I asked many friends and colleagues about problems they had, and didn't here of this crashing epidemic. (No more than I heard it from my wife and son who use Mail.) One poster suggested that it might be RSS; I have used RSS in Mail for testing, but, as I point out in the review, it's not anywhere near a dedicated RSS client (I use NetNewsWire). I did have a friend who had crashes with Mail under Tiger, and we narrowed it down to some input manager being left over from something he tried out. When he removed the program, it obviously left behind an input manager that was still getting loaded.
I'm curious as to whether those who have "10 crashes a day" are using any third-party Mail add-ons, or whether they use Mail for RSS (as one poster said he does). I see no normal reason why Mail would crash that often.
Kirk

[mkmcfr]

I think this has started since the last security update. When I open it, it starts and stops enough to do a few changes before going total colored ball. I was able to take out RSS feeds, To-Dos and Notes. I have 4 mailboxes, the gears turn, it gets the mail, but I can't open them, sometimes the little graphic that shows how many mails are in the box is screwy, then it goes completely dead and I have to force quit and I send the report to Apple. Do they ever answer, or will they just put out a fix some day? Remember the old saying, "it just works"? Well, since I have installed Leopard, that is no longer the case. Mail is the only app that simple doesn't work, but there are small problems with several others. Safari crashes fairly often. That one closes by itself. But I often get colored balls spinning and have to wait awhile in several apps. Is Leopard Vista? Is there a critical mass with operating systems? Can I go back to Tiger? Tiger just worked...

[kirkmc]

For the Mail problem, have you tried rebuilding your mailboxes? (Mailbox menu.) This can resolve a lot of problems, and it's something most people don't think of. As for the other problems, that sounds like serious instability. Third-party ram perhaps? I don't get Safari crashes at all either, on any of my Macs.

Kirk

[mkmcfr]

Yeah, I think rebuilding the mailboxes is the logical next step, before eventually deinstalling and reinstalling from the Leopard disk. I had read other people having problems with To-Dos and RSS, so I tried that first. If you're not aware of these problems, just take a look over at Apple Discussions for Leopard. Seems like other people are having them. Thanks for the help.

[bigcloits]

Quote

The point is, be sure you're blaming the right software for stability problems.

Well said! I think those are excellent comments, with importance that goes beyond this discussion. Regrettably, since I share those beliefs, and have rarely or never used haxies or input managers, it's not an explanation for the crashiness of Mail in my world.

Determining the "true" stability of an application is almost impossible, because it varies so widely, affected not just by haxies and input managers and borked plugins, but by usage patterns, installation errors (see below), and even hardware variables. So of course it is quite possible for an application to seem stable to some users and unstable to others.

Unfortunately, the tendency of an apoplication to generate those edge cases is the thing that makes it "crashy." Most applications, even fairly bad ones, are reasonably stable for most people most of the time. It's the number of exceptions that matter, the tendency of the app to go off the rails in less typical circumstances. And Mail seems to find such edge cases quite routinely in my experience!

For instance, I'm sure one of the reasons that I've had a lot of Mail crashiness is that I was forced to live with a number of early adopter headaches. For reasons I'm not getting into here, I had to do a reckless straight upgrade from 10.4.9 to 10.5.0 on my primary machine to try to solve a nasty problem, and consequently I had to live with the upgrade path bugs that Leopard had out of the gate. It was pretty awful. Mail was as stable as a one-legged chair! That was not just Mail's fault, of course, but other core Apple apps that faired much better in that crapstorm.

But those were exceptional circumstances. I also see Mail crashiness in many typical configurations. I am one of those Mac users who is responsible for casual tech support for a swack of switchers and assorted n00bs, and I have (seriously) six Macs in my house, and so I've had plenty of opportunity to observe Mail crashiness. It seems to be a common problem with Mail and always has been. If you don't do much with it, it's fine. But if you use it "hard" (lotsa messages, multiple accounts, whatever) ... watch out!

Even without the stability problem, however, I would want to see a harsh review of Mail for its many other sins. I've criticized MacWorld simply because I believe the review ignored glaring faults, well-documented by many bloggers, and I just don't see the point of a review that doesn't tell it like it is. This is a pattern in MacWorld reviews that is so strong that I'm losing interest in them, though I do trust some individual writers (Frakes comes to mind).

[metalhaze]

I have used Outlook and I have used Thunderbird.
And even after experiencing those two email clients, I can tell you that I still want to use and love Apple's Mail app.
Sorry, but the UI makes more sense to me. It's easier to accomplish tasks inside mail which in turn helps with productivity.
Smart folders are something I couldn't live without and in my 5 years of using the application. It's only crashed on me maybe 3 times. And the one time it did crash on me it was my fault because I had a plug-in installed that wasn't compatible when I upgraded Mail.
You have to look at what you use your mail app for and choose the right application for what you do. If you are working in a PC business world, then you are a fool for thinking that Apple's Mail is going to work just like Outlook.
Stop picking the wrong tools for your job and complaining about how they don't work the way you want it to. I don't think Mail was ever intended to surpass Outlook in an enterprise situation. Mail always seemed more personal and fun than that.
For personal email, Apple's Mail client rules above all the rest. In enterprise situations, it doesn't stand a chance.
Use the right tool for the job....you wouldn't grab a screwdriver to hammer somthing....so don't think Apple's Mail is going to work like Outlook in your PC-driven business world.

[alansky]

The Apple Mail program isn't perfect, but then nothing ever is. Mail does, however, "just work." It doesn't crash, it's database doesn't get corrupted... Not to mention that it's free with OS X. And anyone who is too lazy to click a Dock icon to switch to iCal should definitely use Entourage instead. That's definitley what they deserve.

[bigcloits]

alansky said:

Mail does, however, "just work." It doesn't crash, it's database doesn't get corrupted...

Ha! Horse waste!

Doesn't crash? I have, right now, as I write this, a reproducible hard hang on dragging a .jpg to the dock icon, which should create a new message with the files attached, but instead brings the program down. Just repeated it five times.

This kind of nonsense happens all the time with Mail.app. No, d'oh, not for everyone ? see my previous post. But entirely too often for many people to run around declaring that Mail "just works" and "doesn't crash."

Everything crashes, man, everything. It's just a matter of how much. And Mail.app has many documented, reproducible crashers.

[griffman]

Quote

{quote:title=bigcloits wrote:}But those were exceptional circumstances. I also see Mail crashiness in many typical configurations. I am one of those Mac users who is responsible for casual tech support for a swack of switchers and assorted n00bs, and I have (seriously) six Macs in my house, and so I've had plenty of opportunity to observe Mail crashiness. It seems to be a common problem with Mail and always has been. If you don't do much with it, it's fine. But if you use it "hard" (lotsa messages, multiple accounts, whatever) ... watch out!{quote}

My usage pattern is anything but "light." I've run Mail since, well, forever, and it's always been among the most stable of my regular apps. And that includes the 10.5 version, which I switched to before 10.5 even shipped. As of today, I have 10,482 messages (spanning five email accounts and 137 various folders). I also have 11,688 sent messages in the archives. (Yes, I keep a lot of mail, though I haven't yet done my 2007 year-end purge). My mail is run through about 20 rules to process and sort it, and a typical day has me sending anywhere from 30 to 100 messages.

Console shows Mail has crashed five times since I upgraded to 10.5. Of those five, four are directly related to my trying to use a plug-in in 10.5 that wasn't yet compatible. Since I figured that out, it's crashed once. Not too bad, I'd say, and based on my figures above, there's no way I qualify as a "light" user of Mail.

In every case that I've had the opportunity to help debug (probably a dozen times over the last couple of years), we've always tracked down Mail crashes to something else -- typically a third-party plug-in, sometimes a malformed email message, sometimes the mailboxes needed to be rebuilt. In all cases, after finding the problem, Mail was stable for the user.

(Note: I do not use RSS in Mail; there's no need for it, and frankly, Apple never should have put it there. (So what, Safari and Mail are now head-to-head competitors for RSS reading? That makes lots of sense...). So I'll grant that it's completely possible RSS in Mail is causing crashes and instability. If that's the case, I highly recommend you stop using RSS in Mail, and switch to a real newsreader such as the now-free NetNewsWire.)

-rob.

[metalhaze]

I love mail and everything but you are just wrong.

The database CAN get corrupted. People have to rebuild their mailboxes because of CORRUPTED files. I have seen it first hand, so what you are saying is just plain wrong.

And yes, as much as I love Mail, it has and will crash. Every applications has the ability to crash. And at some point something you are running on your computer will crash.

Your statements are not backed with any facts and anyone that knows anything about computers would be able to prove to you otherwise.

So stop embarrassing us fellow Mac users with your fallacies.

[griffman]

{quote:title=bigcloits wrote:}Doesn't crash? I have, right now, as I write this, a reproducible hard hang on dragging a .jpg to the dock icon, which should create a new message with the files attached, but instead brings the program down. Just repeated it five times.

This kind of nonsense happens all the time with Mail.app. No, d'oh, not for everyone ? see my previous post. But entirely too often for many people to run around declaring that Mail "just works" and "doesn't crash."{quote}

You clearly have a Mail issue that's specific to your machine. Try this. Create a new user. Set up a gmail/whatever account in that user's Mail program. Drag a JPEG to the Mail dock icon. I bet it won't crash.

I just tried on five different Macs here, dragging a massive 4MB JPG onto Mail's dock icon. No problems whatsoever. If that were a known standard crash, it would have been fixed long ago.

-rob.

[bigcloits]

Quote

My usage pattern is anything but "light."

Thanks for sharing your experience, Rob ? as I have shared mine. I?m glad you?ve been so lucky with Mail. I have not. Many others have not, as is abundantly clear from the number of Apple support forum threads, from the number of negative responses here, from Apple?s copious acknowledged bugs, and from the extremely large body of blogging on the subject. Mail.app has disappointed and frustrated many, many users.