Bagel Belly Blog

Mail so bad it hurts

Every once in a while (like, two to three times a week), Mail.app will get in a mess, and eventually bugs out and crashes (or has to be force-quit). This, despite me ritualistically restarting the damned thing every morning. And sometimes things get even more wonky, like this afternoon. Not only did Mail crash, but the "Submit Crash Report" window got confused too, and wouldn't let me send it to Apple. (Note how the send button is greyed-out in the screenshot).

It's not like I do anything outrageous with my mail client. Most of the time, I'm unsurprisingly just trying to read email. It's true that I have a rather large archive - nudging close to 4gb at the moment - and something like 50 filtering rules set up. But still - it shouldn't be that hard, should it?

It was with serendipitous delight that I saw drunkenbatman's interview talking about Mail.app, with this perfect quote:

[...] its IMAP support drunkenly feeling around the alley looking for an excuse to wee on itself [...]

It seems to sum up precisely the kind of blind stumbling that Mail.app does, usually accompanied by the sound of the IMAP server begging for mercy under the relentless multiple connection thrashing and locking.

I guess I really am going to have to give up another evening of my life and finally, completely switch to tbird. After two major and several minor OS revisions, Apple don't seem to be in any hurry to improve things.