Apple Working on Fix for OS X Mavericks Mail App Issues

Mail.app has sucked ever since 10.6.8

Mail.app in Snow Leopard 10.6.8 was the best e-mail app I've ever used.

So of course in Lion Apple had to go and mess it all up. It was so slow as to be unusable. Mountain Lion addressed the speed issues somewhat but I still see LOTS of annoying behavior (can't click-drag to select messages anymore - WTF; click on messages and have them get marked read, only to shortly afterwards reappear as being unread; delete large groups of messages and Erase all Trash folders yet the messages never got moved to the Trash; Erase Deleted Messages/In All Accounts would take less than a minute in Snow Leopard yet take several minutes in Mountain Lion, etc.).

New releases are supposed to be better, not a backwards step.

(I tried MailMate but it crashed on my personal e-mail account and seemed to be too single-threaded to handle my other accounts where at least it didn't crash.)

Well considering that email is such a breakthrough and new technology that hasn't been around for long, it's understandable that Apple doesn't get it right. I mean, sending messages, made of text, through cables, made of metal. How does text even go through the metal? It's insane! I'm surprised it even works!

gmanist1000 said:

I'm hoping all native apps will be downloadable through the Mac App Store with future OS releases.

Same goes for iOS, seems like the best way to send out updates as quickly as possible - rather than updating the entire OS itself.

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Don't see that it makes any difference really. There's no reason they can't roll out an OS update that only contains the Mail.app fix if they want to, and it would be pretty much the same download size.

I have one too - every time I start the app it asks me for my iCloud password. A bit annoying.

baryon said:

Well considering that email is such a breakthrough and new technology that hasn't been around for long, it's understandable that Apple doesn't get it right. I mean, sending messages, made of text, through cables, made of metal. How does text even go through the metal? It's insane! I'm surprised it even works!

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To be fair, the main problem here is the insane way that Google mangle the perfectly well-understood IMAP standard to do the whole labelling thing.

In 10.8, Mail.app dealt with this by downloading a copy of each email for each label it had, so if it had three labels there were three copies of that email on your disk in three different folders. That's obviously an issue if you have thousands of emails with multiple labels.

In 10.9 they're doing a reference counting thing, so there's only one physical copy of each email on your disk. But it obviously went wrong for a significant minority of people in some circumstances (especially if they had All Mail turned off in their IMAP settings, by the sound of it) -- personally I've had no problems at all.

rockarollr said:

No wonder Mavericks was free... we're all beta testers!

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Indeed. It ****ed up my printer drivers and rendered some programs I use for work unworkable because of the Java version used.
I have been working from my clone drive which still contains my snow leopard system because the main drive with mavericks has had so many issues.
Maybe apple should be paying us to be their guinea pigs.

I'm really impressed by just how many bugs the Mavericks version of Mail seems to have considering Apple haven't changed much in it this time round! I assume they've added support for all the new APIs but I don't see how that could break so much!

eim23x said:

Apple give you a OS X for free which is nice. Do you see Microsoft doing one single thing of that sort.

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Windows 8.1 is free, isn't it?

Just saying...

Anyway, while I do agree regarding Windows not being bug free, I think that the issue here is that Mail is a core app. Many people basically run their business via email. Jerky scrolling or slow shutdown is annoying, but is made out on these forums to be a bigger deal than it actually is to the average user.

If you're running a business and you cannot trust your email that's a very big deal. It's the equivalent to an iPhone not ringing or notifying you of missed calls, for example.

I used to upgrade on the first day, but luckily I've started holding off. I'm glad I did, a Mail is vital to me. But I'm also sad that I now have to.....

Amen!

Amen!

Does anyone have a problem with the Mail app in Mavericks constantly syncing?

There are two ways to check for this behavior:

1. In the bottom left "Mail Activity" box, it will increment up to something like "Incoming Messages...22 of 29" and stay at that exact count (whatever the numbers might be) for 5 to 10 minutes.

2. If you open the Window--->Activity window to watch the syncing process, you'll see that Mail is almost CONSTANTLY syncing your entire iCloud (non-local) folder structure. For anyone with 100s of folders, this pretty much means it spends 5-15 mins syncing ALL your folders, and restarts this process every 5 minutes after it finishes the last sync; consequently there is rarely a time when it's not busy syncing.

I have one Mac w/Mavericks and one w/out Mavericks, and they both access the exact same email accounts with the same amount of folders and messages. The Mac w/out Mavericks does NOT exhibit this behavior. It's running on Mountain Lion, is a 2007 Mac, and yet the Mail client behavior is FAR superior to the Mavericks client's constant syncing.

N.B.: I don't mind if Apple made a change to the client that dictates it is almost always syncing; I just need someone to corroborate that, and I'll then make adjustments by getting rid of my 2 current makes, moving to a single notebook, and moving most of my iCloud folders to the local machine so that they don't have to be synced to anything (giving up, of course, folder accessibility on my iPad and iPhone, but I can deal with that).

I should also add that I have something like 500 folders in the iCloud tree, and approximately 500,000 emails all told across all my accounts (the majority in my iCloud account).

If there is anyone else out there with a lot of emails, an oldster like me perhaps who started emailing in the early 90s and has ported everything into Apple Mail, it would be a HUGE help to me if you could open that Activity window and report your findings.

Thanks!

Mail App No Longer Resolves Email Addresses

I have a list of email addresses in a spreadsheet and have been able to copy and paste them into the previous version of Mail with no problem. They resolved and sent with no bother at all, but since the upgrade to Mavericks and the new version of Mail, they will no longer resolve unless I add a comma "," between every address. Seeing as I have some 900+ addresses, its a bit of a pain. For now I have just added an additional column to my spreadsheet containing a text based comma and that seems to be working, but surely Mail should recognise a list of addresses and resolve them automatically! After all, it did before the upgrade!

I had to dump Mail for Outlook back with Mountain Lion.

Mail has a fatal flaw interacting with Gmail where a sent email intermittently does not show up in the sent folder locally or online, but it does get sent (I have confirmed this myself by contacting the receiver).

Having a record of sent emails is critical for so many applications. I am not the only one experiencing this, there are messages dating back years on the Apple forums with the same issue and it has never been fixed.

Can anyone that has observed this behaviour in the past comment on whether it still occurs?

never had these issues. don't know what are they going to fix.

Luis Ortega said:

Indeed. It ****ed up my printer drivers and rendered some programs I use for work unworkable because of the Java version used.
I have been working from my clone drive which still contains my snow leopard system because the main drive with mavericks has had so many issues.
Maybe apple should be paying us to be their guinea pigs.

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Or maybe you should just follow the usual advice and not update Macs that you use for work until *at least* the .1 update. Every OS X update in history has broken some stuff for a while, you didn't exactly need to be Nostradamus to predict the same for this one.

I want them to fix Messages

gmanist1000 said:

I'm hoping all native apps will be downloadable through the Mac App Store with future OS releases.

Same goes for iOS, seems like the best way to send out updates as quickly as possible - rather than updating the entire OS itself.

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I think this (the lack of Mail updates in Mac App Store) is more of an Apple preference, than a technical feasibility.

Take iTunes for example - I see it in the same "class" as Mail, in that it ships by default with the system. However, iTunes updates often come through the Mac App Store, as opposed to only with system updates.

I think Apple just likes to "align" these kinds of application updates with system updates, but for critical issues, I don't see any reason why they wouldn't flip the switch for a particular app here or there.

No problem with Mail at all. All my problems are with iTunes. Where's that fix Apple?

Moshe1010 said:

Gmail > Mail app

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Lol. No way. Mail has a nice interface, good junk filters, and is ad free. I stopped using gmail about six months ago because of all the silly ads based on my supposed preferences.

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moxin said:

never had these issues. don't know what are they going to fix.

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I am in the boat as you. I have not noticed any issues.

Gmail privacy << Mail app (or pretty much any mail app)

Moshe1010 said:

Gmail > Mail app

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Seems like in the past 2 or 3 years apple product, (especially software) is being released with a lot more glitches than in the past. A trend I am not liking. I've definitely had issues with gmail on mail. Message notification no my phone nothing on my mac. Pretty big glitch for a pretty popular email domain.

On a side note not even a mention of the Nexus 5 release on Macrumors at all. Usually they at least make not of big releases from competitors.

scottishwildcat said:

Or maybe you should just follow the usual advice and not update Macs that you use for work until *at least* the .1 update. Every OS X update in history has broken some stuff for a while, you didn't exactly need to be Nostradamus to predict the same for this one.

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Dude....can't disagree with you more. The bugs that are being reported as broken in OS X Mavericks are some of the HEADLINE new features of the OS.

For example, multiple monitor support was a huge highlighted feature...the discussions on the Apple Support forums indicate it's got MAJOR issues that should have been caught during testing.

And Mail not working with Gmail??? Seriously? Mail wasn't tested properly for compatibility with once of the most popular email services?

The stuff being reported is pretty significant stuff that any serious round of ALPHA testing should have caught.

It's not just "some stuff" that's broken, it's the major features of the OS. None of the other recent OS X updates had this number or severity of problems...
you're just dead wrong on this one.

I can't copy files from Mail to the desktop. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't.

Also I find the buttons that appear once you mouse of the header get in the way of the subject heading making copying the subject heading a right pain in the ass. I need to do this on loads of emails a day to copy and paste the reference number. Now its a fight just to select the subject because the buttons appear in the way.

lewismayell said:

I want them to fix Messages

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I second this. I tried to change the font in Mavericks messages and it only changes the font in the typing box. The displayed messages for me never change and only occasionally do for the other party.

Too late for a fix. Already switched to the best mail client I've ever tried. I'm enjoying Airmail now with no problems, and it's so clean and nice to use!

Apple really needs to spin off the Mac as a separate company. It's obvious the non stop poaching of sw engineers for every iGadget rollout is impacting quality.

How do you mess up an application that has essentially been a staple of every release of OS X?

Yet another reason I'm sticking with Snow Leopard.