[bigcloits]

griffman said:

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.

Of course. But the only test of an application?s robustness that I care about is not how well it works in a nice fresh user account, but how it works in the user account that I, y?know, use. Whatever Mail is tripping on right now, it shouldn?t be, because I haven?t done anything foolish with my user account.

Quote

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.

I didn?t say it was a ?known standard crash.? I said it was a crash on my system right now, in ordinary operating circumstances with no haxies or input managers. That?s relevant. I?m not making it up to score points. It?s actually crashing when it really shouldn?t. Come on over for coffee, everyone, and I?ll show you!

[griffman]

I don't think "lucky" is the proper word here. I mean, if anyone should be ripe for Mail issues, it's me. I've tested hundreds of Mail hints. I've used it on everything from a G4/733 to a Mac Pro and everything in between. And yet I have trouble remembering the last time Mail crashed. Mail has bugs, no doubt. But anyone experiencing daily (even weekly or monthly) crashes in Mail has something else going on causing the problems -- if Mail were that buggy in general, there would be hundreds of thousands of upset users, not hundreds or thousands.

The fact that there are many who experience problems doesn't prove the case one way or the other: nobody who is having a perfect experience with Mail posts a new thread: "Hey, just wanted to say, Mail's running fine!" Hence, you get a skewed perspective on things. Also consider the number of Mail users; it must be in the millions -- say five million, just to make the math easy. So even if 50,000 people start new threads (which they're not doing) with Mail issues, that's only 1% of Mail users.

Diagnosing such issues, of course, isn't simple. But as a start, disabling third-party preference panes, any Mail plug-ins, and creating a new user are all good starting points. And please don't summarize this post to say "Rob says Mail is perfect, stupid Apple fanboy." It's not perfect. It has bugs. But it doesn't have crashing bugs that are causing a majority -- or even a sizable percentage of -- of Mail users to have multiple daily crashes.

-rob.

[griffman]

So you've tried standard troubleshooting? You've rebuilt all the accounts? You've trashed the prefs and rebuilt them?

-rob.

[Thermo]

Mail crashes on me regularly. All I have installed is DockStar and this isn’t the problem.
I’ve rebuild mail, set up another user account and tried mail under another user and had the same problems. Other people have the same problem For someone to say there is not a problem, just shows their stupidity.
Some other people are having problems with things that work perfectly for me. Does this mean that they are lying or the problem doesn’t exist. No, it means that there is a problem and luckily it doesn’t affect me.
The people that say that Mail is fine the way it is and doesn't need to increase its feature set are just ignorant. If this is not the case then Apple won't come out with a Mail 4 or Os 10.6 at some point. The world we live in requires change and enhancements or someone else will do it and the product will become obsolete.
Stating that someone is lazy is because they want to be more efficient is pathetic. Maybe if you make $6.00/ hour and your time is not valuable, the extra time is not worth much in you case. If this is your only rational, you shouldn't even waste your time and make a post. My time as well as many others is very valuable and I don't want to waste it.
I would also like to tell them that THEY are lazy by using the internet. Why don't you walk down to the library, and use it to get all of your information. They should also write letters and mail them instead of sending emails and get rid of their cell phones and use pay phones. We want things to always get better and continue to save us time
Mail will either be improved by Apple or it will be discontinued and I highly doubt it will be discontinued. Therefore its enhancements are going to come eventually and I’m sure we can all agree on that. The only thing we will disagree on is at what speed they will occur. I personally think they should happen sooner than later.

[bigcloits]

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And please don't summarize this post to say "Rob says Mail is perfect, stupid Apple fanboy."

:-) I would not do that. I respect your work and your opinion, Rob, and I?m glad you?ve weighed in here. I got bored with flaming in 1992.

Quote

It's not perfect. It has bugs. But it doesn't have crashing bugs that are causing a majority -- or even a sizable percentage of -- of Mail users to have multiple daily crashes.

I agree that most users are not experiencing problems, as I think (?) I made clear in an earlier post. But I do think that there is an unhealthy number of edge cases where Mail falls flat on its face. And I freely admit that I hold applications to a high standard. I expect rock solid performance, because I know it?s possible, because there are applications that rarely, if ever, crash. Those should be the standard of comparison, I think. Any application that doesn?t meet that standard deserves some criticism, particularly when it comes from the desk of Steve ?Just Works? Jobs.

[bigcloits]

griffman said:

So you've tried standard troubleshooting? You've rebuilt all the accounts? You've trashed the prefs and rebuilt them?

Haven?t even bothered yet. I?m sure I can get it fixed, but I also have better things to do, like spend the morning contributing to this discussion. ;-) I?m absolutely certain that you are correct, that the bug would not occur in a test account, and that it would probably be eliminated by standard troubleshooting. In fact, I?d be willing to bet it can be fixed even more easily than that: it?ll probably be gone on the next login! Stuff happens, and then it often stops happening. Computers have always been like that for me. Perhaps I emit a mysterious app-crashing energy field. Or not.

The point of bringing it up was only to show that, indeed, Mail.app can be crashy under perfectly normal, non-risky operating circumstances. I could have referred to countless historical incidents, but it was more dramatic to say, ?Hey, look guys, it?s happening right now!?

[metalhaze]

I am guessing that your time is soooo important that you had the time to stop a create a new MacWorld user account just to post a long winded, 6 paragraph post filled with nothing but your own opinions and hardly any facts or interesting points about a Mail application that perfectly suites the needs of many users without the issues you are describing.

You may not be one of those users that it pleases, but that doesn't make it a worthless application and it doesn't mean people have to share your same views and opinions just because you are have having trouble with it.

Alot of people don't have the crashes and problems that many other people report. There are too many user specific variables that go into the stability of an application. You have to factor in your ISP and the type of mail you are using, your plug-ins that you may or may not have installed, your OS version, your computer and whether or not it has viruses, the type of emails you are trying to read, what other apps you are running at the time, whether on not you have corrupt files, and so on and so forth.

One person may have to rebuild their mailbox due to corruption and the other person may never have this issue. You can't pin point Mail and blame all issues you have on it.

I know Mail isn't perfect, but it really isn't has bad as you are leading it on to be. At least for me it isn't....And for alot of people, Mail is all they will ever need.

Why go through the hassle of setting up another mail client if what came free with the Mac already works beautifully? Believe it or not, the major demographic using Mac computers and Mail are not power users that sit in MacWorld all day bitching about power features that it doesn't have in comparison to Outlook. Most Mac users want a simple app that does what it says it will, and Apple's Mail does just that. If you are trying to use it to do something it can't do, they why the hell are you trying to use it?

[griffman]

I agree Mail (or any app, obviously) can be crashy. Given that it's, well, my job :), though, I usually try to figure out if the problem is actually with the app in question -- and if it is, is it a bug, a plug-in, or something else causing the problem. I understand others not being inclined to the same level of troubleshooting, for it's not their job.

The bigger picture issue is that any app can (and probably will) crash at some point in time. But that fact doesn't mean the app is horribly buggy, nor unusable by anyone, or even that more than a few people are affected by whatever problem is occurring. It means simply that some combination of hardware, software, and the deities of computing have chosen your machine to inflict their wrath upon :)

-rob.

[Thermo]

bq. Believe it or not, the major demographic using Mac computers and Mail are not power users that sit in MacWorld all day bitching about power features that it doesn't have in comparison to Outlook. Most Mac users want a simple app that does what it says it will, and Apple's Mail does just that.
This is exactly the argument that Motorola said about their phones when Apple said they were releasing the iPhone.
Believe it or not, the major demographic using mobile phones are not power users that sit in MacWorld all day bitching about power features that it doesn't have in comparison to iPhone. Most Motorola users want a simple phone that does what it says it will, and Motorola does just that.
Now look what happened.

[mkmcfr]

Ok, everyone, let's all calm down a minute... I'm sure that somehow, we are all right. The Mac is the coolest thing around, I love it. However, since Leopard has arrived things have slowed down a lot. If I was rich, I would get a super pro + with zillions of gigs of ram and i'm sure it would all be hunky dory, BUT... i am just a poor working boy and i only have a MacBook that cost me 1,500 Euro!!! Everything works fine, I love it, I love Mac, I love Steve, I love all the gossip web sites, I love to upgrade within 15 minutes of them coming out... but ever since I installed Leopard, some of my apps have slowed down and Safari crashes regularly. And now, since the last security fix, Mail 3.2 is freezing every time I open it.

Now, I have been playing around with it for awhile. It works a little, in starts and stops, when I first open it and if I react very quickly, I can change one or two things before it freezes. I took out the To-Dos and the Notes: no good. I took out the RSS feeds: no good. I have 4 mail boxes (or accounts, if you prefer). 2 for my own provider and 2 for work, one for myself and one is my boss' account, in case i need to get something out of his mail. I took out all the accounts and reconstructed them. At first, it seemed to work, but then it started freezing again. Now, I have taken my boss' account out and it seems to work fine with only the 3 others. So, there must be some kind of conflict with his account. (I am embarrassed to say that it is an AOL account and he does get a lot of spam and stuff. But he's the boss, right? You can't change him. And I need to get into his mail from my machine from time to time, so we've got to find a way to make it work).

Is it a memory problem? He only has 150 messages in his box. Is there a conflict between the 2 AOL accounts? I will keep experimenting and keep you informed. All I can say is that it worked with Outlook on the office PC, it worked with Thunderbird on a PC. Now, why isn't it working with Mail on my Mac?

[alderete]

{quote:title=metalhaze wrote:}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.



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

Ummm. Actually, there's no database of email used by Mail. Go check out ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes. Each "mailbox" is a folder, which contains an index, and a folder of message files, which are stored in a plain text format, and is almost standard email files (Mail adds some extra XML stuff at the end to preserve metadata, help indexing, etc.)

So, for "the database" to get corrupted, your file system would need to be corrupted. Go run DiskWarrior.

Now, to be clear, the indexes can get corrupted. But the indexes can be completely rebuilt, by scanning through the email files; that's what the Rebuild Mailbox command does. But indexes do not a database make.

Occasionally it's possible for individual email files to get corrupted, in ways that are not recoverable. Maybe that's the problem you're having. But it should be quite rare, and limited to a single message. Again, not a database.

All of this stands in vast contrast to the way that Entourage or Outlook work, where they do store email in a huge database file. Used to be that once it got past two gigabytes, you'd have all kinds of problems. Been there, done that. Huge email database files suck.

Fortunately, that's not what Apple Mail uses.

[Thermo]

I haven't used AOL in a good 15 years so I don't know much about it.

You could try this - set up a gmail account for your boss. Set up AOL to forward the email to the gmail account. You can then set up Mail to check the gmail account (if you want to reply to the emails on your boss' behalf, change the smtpout settings on the account to the AOL account information). If your boss wants to he can just use the gmail account from now on and he won't have to worry about not getting his messages from people who do not change over to the new email address because AOL will forward them.

[alderete]

{quote:title=Thermo wrote:}For someone to say there is not a problem, just shows their stupidity.



The people that say that Mail is fine the way it is and doesn't need to increase its feature set are just ignorant.



Stating that someone is lazy is because they want to be more efficient is pathetic.



I would also like to tell them that THEY are lazy by using the internet.{quote}

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." -- Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting

[mkmcfr]

Thanks, Thermo. Actually, that is a pretty good idea. Kinda like using a wad of chewing gum to patch a hot water pipe, but it could work until Apple gets its act together. However, I am not going to try to explain Gmail to my boss. I'll just keep it to myself. He doesn't really even know what a computer is for except getting the latest sports results without having to wait for the evening news. His Dell is so old, it probably came bundled with AOL. The monitor has even gone green, but since his ex-wife said it was all good, nobody can change anything. He's worse than my parents. I got my Dad a MacBook for Christmas so he wouldn't have to go upstairs to the office, but he thinks that WebTV is cooler. By the way, do you happen to know how to forward mail from the WebTV to Gmail?