February 3, 2005

Mac Mail app, not all it could be

I'm going through clearing out a selection of mailing lists I simply don't have time to follow any more (54,910 unread messages and counting ...). It turns out Mail is pretty dumb: if I delete a folder and it happens to be updating it's cache of the folder, it does not stop the update and then do the delete. Oh, no ... that would be too easy. It deletes the folder during the cache update.
So now for each mail message in the folder it just deleted, I'm getting:

Unable to open "*** Orphaned mailbox foo" IMAP command "SELECT" failed

There were over 8000 emails in that folder. That's an awful lot of times to click "OK".
Maybe it's time to switch to Thunderbird?

Posted by savs at February 3, 2005 10:18 PM
Comments

Tbird has about the best IMAP engine you're likely to come across - it has the most complete support of any free software mailer, and close to the best proprietary.

Posted by: Alex Hudson at February 3, 2005 11:04 PM

http://www.livejournal.com/users/acheron_hades/72307.html

but YMMV..

Posted by: Steve D at February 4, 2005 8:54 AM

I remember a few years ago, I renamed one of my Mail folders (locally stored) to /. (in an attempt to be clever for recording interesting slashdot related info). This caused a tremendous amount of disk thrashing on my iBook, and I wondered what was going on. After it had all finished, all my mail was gone :(

Following several mail client changes, I started to use mutt, and haven't looked back since. It's text only, but that's all I want, as I have the mail exported via IMAP for further examination when needed.

Posted by: Ashley T. Howes at February 5, 2005 4:33 PM

Hi Ashley,

Mutt should be taken out and shot :-)

I was a long-time user of Pine, and I had a brief dalliance with Mutt. When I moved to the Mac, I left terminal-based (or derived) clients behind.

On the whole, the drag-n-drop-n-point-n-click solution really is the only way to deal with "modern" email communications. With so many PDFs, OpenOffice docs, and other binaries coming in and out, having proper integration really really helps.

Mind you, I pay for that "ease of use". These GUI mail apps have a far higher maintenance overhead. It's a fine line ...

Posted by: Andrew Savory at February 5, 2005 5:09 PM

mutt is the only sane way of reading email, IMSNHO - but alas I have no Unix box to play with any more, so I have to make do with those icky sticky GUI apps.

I didn't find integration a problem - but then my mail was mostly plain text. Having urlview bound to Ctrl-B worked fine for pulling links out of messages and opening them in new tabs in galeon, the MIME handling seemed to work fine - sometimes a bit of tweaking required to the config files to get the right apps to start in the right environments, but once done it was pretty smooth. Having easy access to regex-like search and select was nice too.

Having said all that, the IMAP support wasn't great in mutt last time I tried it, and there was no offline support - but under Unix, one would probably expect to use a separate util to sync local copies of remote folders, anyway..

Posted by: Steve D at February 5, 2005 9:22 PM