If you have a Mail rule to mark certain Gmail messages as read it doesn't actually mark them properly with the Gmail server. Restarting mail shows them all as unread when you restart Mail. I have also never gotten my unread count to show up in the Dock icon.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Acknowledges Continuing Issues with OS X Mail, Offers Manual Workaround
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I've never found Mail to be a great program. Back when OS X first came out, I used Mulberry, but switched to Thunderbird once that became available a few years later. Mail always seemed flakey to me. I never felt like I could trust it... I've tried switching back to it throughout the years, but always wind up back at Thunderbird. The most recent Thunderbird has been especially great (using the v27 beta).
Sparrow looked interesting, but was then acquired by Google. Does anyone have feedback on how Airmail is? It looks like a very promising, Mac-like alternative.
Sparrow looked interesting, but was then acquired by Google. Does anyone have feedback on how Airmail is? It looks like a very promising, Mac-like alternative.
I still haven't installed Mavericks on any of the four Macs in our house and I don't have any plans to do it anytime soon.
I only wish I had used a similar amount of wisdom before upgrading my iPad 3 to iOS 7.
I sure do miss the Apple I once knew. The one that got things a LOT closer to ready-for-primetime before releasing them.
Mark
I only wish I had used a similar amount of wisdom before upgrading my iPad 3 to iOS 7.
I sure do miss the Apple I once knew. The one that got things a LOT closer to ready-for-primetime before releasing them.
Mark
True but...
I agree that iOS 7 has had a bunch of issues. I know this from having to workaround issues in my apps, especially if you are trying to support more than iOS7. However, this was a pretty significant rewrite under the hood. When things moved iOS 5 with iCloud, we saw the same sort of issues. I think the next iOS will be much more solid and add only a few features that are needed moving forward.
I guess I'm saying that software is hard and bugs are nearly impossible to completely vet especially when you are running on a one-year upgrade cycle which is pretty insane (look at Windows and most other software). But yes, they do need to do a bit more work on stability.
I agree that iOS 7 has had a bunch of issues. I know this from having to workaround issues in my apps, especially if you are trying to support more than iOS7. However, this was a pretty significant rewrite under the hood. When things moved iOS 5 with iCloud, we saw the same sort of issues. I think the next iOS will be much more solid and add only a few features that are needed moving forward.
I guess I'm saying that software is hard and bugs are nearly impossible to completely vet especially when you are running on a one-year upgrade cycle which is pretty insane (look at Windows and most other software). But yes, they do need to do a bit more work on stability.
If mail is the worst app, the mac app store is runner up, followed by finder taking bronze
No Finder takes second place, super buggy and freezey and crashy.
Having this problem with IMAP mailboxes/accounts but it's not causing me enough trouble to worry me.
This sort-of fixes things, but it doesn't fix the not-synching issue I have. Mail read on my iPhone/iPad is most of the time not marked as read in Mavericks Mail, not even on the latest 10.9.2 beta, sadly.
I've gone back to Postbox after trying Mail for 6 months
I used to use Thunderbird almost exclusively, but moved to Postbox about a year ago after I found that Thunderbird was no longer being developed.
Whilst Postbox was pretty good a year ago, it suffered stability problems and crashed quite often, leading me to try Apple Mail, which I had never really used for day to day work.
I've found the experience to be sub-par for an Apple product.
My main gripe is that it seems very slow. Just opening Mail and trying to see my new emails (from my work IMAP server) takes a couple of minutes, which is unacceptable - web mail is ten times faster. I don't have any complex rules, just a couple of "moves" from certain senders. Looking at the Mail Activity Window shows it doing all sorts of things, indexing, caching, pre-washing, rinsing etc....
More seriously, I've found that in many mail boxes some messages are missing, e.g. a whole day's messages might not show up. After rebuilding the mail box they re-appear, but I've had to do this more and more often, and it has eroded my confidence in the product.
PostBox now seems considerably more stable than my previous experience (I've been using it for a week without any crashes). It's a lot faster than Mail, and I think it has more features (including the Thunderbird plug-ins).
Let's see if Apple can pick up the game with Mail, but for now, I'll stick with PostBox unless I have any major issues.
John.
I used to use Thunderbird almost exclusively, but moved to Postbox about a year ago after I found that Thunderbird was no longer being developed.
Whilst Postbox was pretty good a year ago, it suffered stability problems and crashed quite often, leading me to try Apple Mail, which I had never really used for day to day work.
I've found the experience to be sub-par for an Apple product.
My main gripe is that it seems very slow. Just opening Mail and trying to see my new emails (from my work IMAP server) takes a couple of minutes, which is unacceptable - web mail is ten times faster. I don't have any complex rules, just a couple of "moves" from certain senders. Looking at the Mail Activity Window shows it doing all sorts of things, indexing, caching, pre-washing, rinsing etc....
More seriously, I've found that in many mail boxes some messages are missing, e.g. a whole day's messages might not show up. After rebuilding the mail box they re-appear, but I've had to do this more and more often, and it has eroded my confidence in the product.
PostBox now seems considerably more stable than my previous experience (I've been using it for a week without any crashes). It's a lot faster than Mail, and I think it has more features (including the Thunderbird plug-ins).
Let's see if Apple can pick up the game with Mail, but for now, I'll stick with PostBox unless I have any major issues.
John.
Mail with Exchange (also)
Since 10.7, Mail has had problems. It couldn't check two Exchange accounts without losing folders requiring a resync once or more per day. It STILL is not fixed. iOS can do it, why can Mail?
There are threads on the Mac forums with 10's of thousands of views and it's STILL not working properly. Boggles the mind.
Since 10.7, Mail has had problems. It couldn't check two Exchange accounts without losing folders requiring a resync once or more per day. It STILL is not fixed. iOS can do it, why can Mail?
There are threads on the Mac forums with 10's of thousands of views and it's STILL not working properly. Boggles the mind.
Mavericks Mail.app and iBooks.app are garbage applications and both have been permanently deleted from my Mac.
My biggest remaining pet peeves with Mavericks are the audio issues and the beach balling. FFS Apple, get it together!! Fix the bloody operating system!
-ITG
My biggest remaining pet peeves with Mavericks are the audio issues and the beach balling. FFS Apple, get it together!! Fix the bloody operating system!
-ITG
If that's true, why is it when I tell it to check for mail manually with the "get new messages for all accounts" envelope button, it comes up with the no new mail messages even though I can plainly see the new messages with Thunderbird or logging into mail from my browser? Wouldn't checking it every x minutes be the same difference as manually clicking to check mail? If so, it won't make a bit of difference. Exiting mail and restarting finds the mail like it says. Manually checking it does no good at all here.
I mentioned how awful I think mail is on a recent visit to an Apple store and the Apple person I was talking with, without missing a beat, said "just use Google mail, it's what we all do."
I use a private domain on gmail, and gmail is one of the worst mail interfaces ever devised.
I've wondered if some of the continuing issues with OSX Mail.app is the fact most developers probably don't really use it for their regular email. It seems more of a consumer app. Who knows. Glad they admit it still has issues tho.
Your quote had no framing context. Given that the article is about a broken (critical) feature, the comment is easily read as sarcasm or flamebait rather than along the lines of reminiscing.
On your computer perhaps. I've personally extremely rarely had Finder crash on me with any version of OSX, for that matter and when it did it was usually a 3rd party bug with XtraFinder or something that the author usually fixes pretty fast. The fact that after a decade they haven't added a dual-pane option, though while adding just plain STUPID "features" to OSX does boggle the mind, though, but XtraFinder fixes most of these problems very well. They should just license/buy the code from him.
Frankly, I think a list of annoying problems introduced in recent OSX releases (possibly including Mountain Lion or not since I can't check now) isn't a bad idea. I've included a few from various other sources, but most are my own observations:
1> Mail still buggered as the thread title acknowledges
2> You can't open Windows or PPC ISOs with Disk Utility, Disk Image Mounter or Toast Titanium any longer. I had to download The Unarchiver just to open the contents (still don't "Mount"). This one is pretty annoying for some people looking to add virtual CD/DVDs to WINE as mentioned in another thread by someone. It just doesn't make sense to add more Microsoft compatible networking features like SMB2 and Exchange to OSX, but then ditch the ability to read Windows ISO images.... One has to wonder if they simply overlooked something in their race to make everything Cocoa and 64-bit and it just got short-changed or something.
3> You can't preview many formats with Quickview (spacebar in Finder) any longer due to Quicktime X (which isn't related to Quicktime 9 in the same way that Final Cut X isn't related to Final Cut 9) not supporting them or the old plugins for Quicktime 9. This is even more annoying than not being able to open ISOs since this comes up often if you have any number of .AVI or .MKV type videos in your media library. But just as annoying, iTunes/AppleTV never supported these formats either so if you have them, too darn bad, I guess. You either convert, run XBMC or some other program or buy a Windows machine that isn't so damn limited.
4> If you have check for automatic updates, the update "reminder" has no dismiss/quit/never option. You either tell it to BUG YOU tomorrow or do it right then or turn off checking for automatic updates.... ANNOYING AS HELL.
5> 3rd party non Apple signed software not only has to be checked to even work in preferences ala the new annoying as hell "Gatekeeper", but the Firewall settings will IGNORE the program on EVERY SINGLE RUN despite settings in the Firewall for it. In other words, if I run XBMC 12.3 here, it will ask me every single time I run it if I want to allow XBMC to take incoming connections and point me to the Firewall settings to make it go away. The problem is it's already in the Firewall settings as "allowed" and deleting it and manually entering it makes no difference. Since it's not an Apple developer signed App, Apple JUST IGNORES THEIR OWN FIREWALL SETTING FOR IT. This is INCREDIBLY ANNOYING and Mavericks makes it much more difficult to change the flag for it to stop doing that. The point is that it SHOULD respect YOUR decision in the Firewall settings for ANY app and not pester you with some stupid requester every fracking time you run it. This one is UNFORGIVABLE IMO and Apple has not done anything about it long before even Gatekeeper came into being (i.e. Firewall has been buggered on and off in different ways since I dunno...Leopard? The fact is they have (or at least had) two separate firewalls that don't talk well to each other and one is SHELL only). It just works? BS. It hasn't worked right in a long time, although I thought it was working OK until recently, but then I didn't have to update XBMC until recently, so I may have not noticed as I probably flagged the older version to not do that which isn't as simple anymore in Mavericks.
6> 10.9.0 had a dock that could migrate from monitor to monitor, but only if it was on the bottom. As far as I can tell here in 10.9.1, it won't migrate to another monitor in any position now. WTF can't they just have a dock on each monitor like they have for the menu bar now? It's just unreal the stupidity at Apple that they can't think of something so darn basic.
7> Apple's power saving sleep settings IGNORE NFS network connections to your machine so if you use your computer as a server to other devices (e.g. XBMC boxes) and use NFS, you can't let your computer sleep or it will go to sleep in the middle of watching a video, etc. as it only recognizes SMB and AFP as reasons to not let the computer sleep even though they ship OSX with NFS also (and don't support it in "sharing" either even though it seems to be more reliable than either one for working across multiple OS/systems).
8> FaceTime doesn't like many 3rd party webcams. I have a Logitech model with full OSX support and stereo mics and full 720P Skype support and 1080p recording support (forget model offhand as I'm not at home) and it works great in Skype, but in Facetime, sooner or later the image "stutters" on a single frozen frame with an alternating animated frame creating a "Max Headroom" like effect until I lower it to the dock and back or move into the exact same position as the frozen frame where it magically unfreezes. Only the Logitech camera does this (i.e. my built-in webcam on my MBP does not, but my Mini doesn't have a webcam so I bought the Logitech). It's pretty annoying, but I won't hold my breath on Apple fixing a problem with someone else's camera even though they leave Mini users few options (the Logitech blows away Apple's cameras, though and has stereo sound even and works perfectly in Skype and other apps).
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Feel free to add others as long as they're problems in general and not just one on your particular machine. I've reported several of these issues to Apple, but I think they just toss most feedback right into the trash can, to be honest.
Why?
Why was this even remotely allowed to happen? This is core functionality and Mail.app isn't exactly a complicated program. If you can't rely on the built in apps anymore, what else can you rely on?
Even windows 8 has a functioning mail client, and Microsoft doesn't even control the hardware.
So much for "it just works".
Why was this even remotely allowed to happen? This is core functionality and Mail.app isn't exactly a complicated program. If you can't rely on the built in apps anymore, what else can you rely on?
Even windows 8 has a functioning mail client, and Microsoft doesn't even control the hardware.
So much for "it just works".
And then Google bought Sparrow and the last update was 9/11/2012.
I liked Sparrow, too, until Google bought them.
I encountered something like this for the first time yesterday. Mail downloaded okay, but it didn't show up until I restarted Mail, or toggled some mailbox views.
I also had to battle various mailbox preferences changing on me, SMTP servers not sticking, that kind of thing—and it was enough for me to announce angrily to those present that Mail was a 'steaming pile of ****', and to wonder why, after more than 10 years, Apple still hadn't fixed it.
I thought maybe I was overreacting, but it's interesting to read this today and see that it's something of a shared sentiment!
I also had to battle various mailbox preferences changing on me, SMTP servers not sticking, that kind of thing—and it was enough for me to announce angrily to those present that Mail was a 'steaming pile of ****', and to wonder why, after more than 10 years, Apple still hadn't fixed it.
I thought maybe I was overreacting, but it's interesting to read this today and see that it's something of a shared sentiment!
I mentioned how awful I think mail is on a recent visit to an Apple store and the Apple person I was talking with, without missing a beat, said "just use Google mail, it's what we all do."
He needs to be sacked.
----------
Typical of Adoogle.