I know, I know, I keep complaining and I should just switch already. But here’s a few more notes on my problems with Apple’s OS X Mail app (version 1.3.11, for Panther 10.3.9), before I finally ditch it.
If you are going to be on a low bandwidth connection, you might think it’s a good idea to only keep a local copy of messages you’ve read. Unfortunately, Mail.app will then become completely unable to search any of your mail, even complete messages that were downloaded before you changed your archival settings. Even if you have gigabytes of mail stored locally. grep is your friend.
So I gave up with downloading any Mail at all until I returned. While I was away I accrued some 4072 emails. It’s taken two days and a ton of patience to get them all downloaded and sorted.
Firstly, Mail was left running overnight on an ADSL connection, and crashed some time during the night whilst trying to download. Nice.
Secondly, on a fast connection, it’s taken several restarts, much clicking on the “Get New Mail” and “Synchronize” buttons to finally get all the mail stored locally.
And finally, I’ve had to individually select batches of email and manually click the “Apply Rules” menu option, since Mail refused to process around 3000 of the mails as they were downloaded. Selecting all the unsorted mail and clicking “Apply Rules” was insufficient as Mail failed to apply them and simply stopped after looking at (and doing nothing with) the first 500 emails. Trial and error suggests “Apply Rules” will fail with anything more than about 1000 mail messages.
I remember fondly the days when I used procmail and mutt or pine, never missing a mail and working contentedly on high and low bandwidth connections. I don’t think it’s just the overwhelming amount of spam these days. I’m going to try Thunderbird, and if that fails I’ll go back to console-based solutions.
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Might be worth you taking a look at Tiger’s mail.app also. It’s significantly different. I have 33,000 messages, and I have very few problems, although it sometimes takes a while to get lots of mail if I’ve been away for a week or whatever.
I’m actually starting to wonder if IMAP actually /scales/ to the level of hundreds of thousands of messages. Mine seems to work okay with 33,000 messages, with only the occasional glitch, but I’m not convinced having 33,000 messages was commonplace when IMAP4 was standardised.
Tbird actually has an extremely good IMAP client implementation – I would venture better than Tiger’s mail.app, and certainly better than most (if not all, Entourage possibly excepted).
If you have an intelligent IMAP *server*, you’ll find Tbird is extremely quick. It also has IDLE support and other such goodness.
The multiple connection issue is not the fault of mail.app really–it’s your IMAP server. It’s permitting that number which is in my opinion bad behavior on its part. Poke about a bit, as there are probably settings you can insert on the mail.app side to limit it’s behavior–that of course if you don’t have control the mail server. If you do, change it there instead.