[kennedy]

I have just switched from Eudora for Windows to Apple Mail... and of course that means I am hitting Apple Mail pretty hard right now... however, a few crashes have me worried...

Does Apple Mail crash a lot?
If so, I'd like to figure that out sooner rather than later... I'll switch instead to Eudora for Mac.

As an example, whenever it tries to display an HTML message received from VersionTracker, Mail churns for a bit and then unexpectedly quits. Definitely NOT acceptable behavior.

[Peter]

The jaguar mail.app is very solid and stable - I really like it. Panther's mail.app has more features but can crash sometimes (happened twice in a week, not so bad).
I find leaving mail open very useful

[suthercd]

The released version of Mail.app has never crashed. Why people seem to think that making negative comments about pre-release NDA products is cool is a mystery.

Craig

[tritonus]

Originally posted by kennedy:
I have just switched from Eudora for Windows to Apple Mail... and of course that means I am hitting Apple Mail pretty hard right now... however, a few crashes have me worried...

Does Apple Mail crash a lot?
If so, I'd like to figure that out sooner rather than later... I'll switch instead to Eudora for Mac.

As an example, whenever it tries to display an HTML message received from VersionTracker, Mail churns for a bit and then unexpectedly quits. Definitely NOT acceptable behavior.

Welcome, switcher and congratulations!

My Mail.app (OS X 10.2.6) is very stable. I don't remember any crash. Safari 1.0, yes, but now Mail. Something wrong with your config?

edit: Um, yes, I have it open all the time, too.

[kennedy]

Originally posted by suthercd:
The released version of Mail.app has never crashed. Why people seem to think that making negative comments about pre-release NDA products is cool is a mystery.

Just to be clear... I am using 10.2.6. I installed the OS X Public Beta when it first came out... but since I've moved to it for real work, I always give a couple weeks even for the public updates to get shaken out by others. No pre-release stuff here. Nor any plugins or non-standard stuff.

It consistently crashes on one particular mail message... a very complex HTML beast sent by Version Tracker. I have other VersionTracker emails that it doesn't crash on. But it consistently crashes on it every time I open it.

Anyway... didn't mean to be an alarmist... just wanted to make sure I hadn't paddled into waters I didn't want to be in... I live in my email system... it must work reliably.

Prior to this I had used Mail a fair amount as a non-critical tool. It wasn't ready for prime-time in 10.0 or 10.1... but it seemed more than ready in 10.2... and so far I have been pleased other than the crash (scary) and some missing threading functionality (other thread on that). But given I've just gone from a couple hundred messages to over 300,000 email messages that it must manage... I am a little nervous.

[hotani]

mine is crashing like mad.

It crashes if i look at it funny. I started using thunderbird since mail.app can't seem to keep it together.

I'm using panther. iPhoto is doing the same thing. pretty frikkin' irritating really.

Basically it happens when i click to another folder, select messages, delete messages, open messages... like i said, it doesn't take much.

[Love Calm Quiet]

KENNEDY:
Please let us know if you're on Jag or Panther.
I assume you're using Mail 1.3?
I dumped Eudora for Mac about a year ago - and am so glad to be rid of that clunky interface (tho I hear latest may be smoother).
I'm not remembering Mail app crashing on any of my systems, and I have it checking several POP accounts regularly for home & work.

You might want to describe a little more about your setup and what "hitting it hard" means in your case. [ I'm not using VT HTML notification so I've no data on that ]

[jcb9]

I've been using Mail.app since the 10.0.4 days, and I don't think I can ever remember it crashing. I mean, it may have crashed at some point in the past, but it's so rare and so long ago that if it did, I can't really remember it anymore.

[OptimusG4]

Originally posted by jcb9:
I've been using Mail.app since the 10.0.4 days, and I don't think I can ever remember it crashing. I mean, it may have crashed at some point in the past, but it's so rare and so long ago that if it did, I can't really remember it anymore.

I'll second that one.

[kennedy]

Originally posted by Love Calm Quiet:
KENNEDY:
Please let us know if you're on Jag or Panther.
I assume you're using Mail 1.3?

I thought I was pretty clear in that Aug 30th mail... I was using 10.2.6 (Jaguar)... Mail 1.2.5... and now I've moved all the way to 10.2.8 (oooh, ahhh). I've been holding off on Panther due to all the issues reported so far... but I really need some of the new Panther features, so I am looking to upgrade soon. (I actually bought it two months ago.)

I dumped Eudora for Mac about a year ago - and am so glad to be rid of that clunky interface (tho I hear latest may be smoother).
I'm not remembering Mail app crashing on any of my systems, and I have it checking several POP accounts regularly for home & work.

You might want to describe a little more about your setup and what "hitting it hard" means in your case. [ I'm not using VT HTML notification so I've no data on that ]

Hitting it hard means I get hundreds of emails a day... they get auto-filtered into one of about 20 inboxes... I read them and sort them into one of about 300 folders. Some folders have around 10,000 messages in them... some of my regularly used folders have 3000 messages. And many messages have attachments of around a megabyte or two... so it is managing HUGE files.


My review: it only rarely crashes... maybe once every three weeks... and it seems to just be in the HTML rendering stuff... so, that is not too bothersome. More bothersome is its periodic "Writing changes to disk..." that can get strangely frequent after Mail's been open for a week or more... and that can turn Mail into a real performance dog!! I sometimes resort to quitting and restarting to get performance back to normal. A more minor complaint is that some attachments show up as "embedded" images, at which point getting to the actual attachment can be a nightmare. And there's some threading functionality from Eudora that I still miss.

Other than that, I've been VERY happy with Mail. The Junk filtering has been a lifesaver... it gets about 100-200/day... misses maybe 5-10/day... and very rarely has a false positive. And the rest of the functionality is a pleasure to use... email is pleasurable again (it was absolutely miserable before).

Jaguar Mail is NOT crash-proof... but it is adequately stable in my experience, even under very heavy usage. Sometime in the next month or two I'll be checking out Panther and Mail 1.3.


Brian

[typoon]

Originally posted by kennedy:
I thought I was pretty clear in that Aug 30th mail... I was using 10.2.6 (Jaguar)... Mail 1.2.5... and now I've moved all the way to 10.2.8 (oooh, ahhh). I've been holding off on Panther due to all the issues reported so far... but I really need some of the new Panther features, so I am looking to upgrade soon. (I actually bought it two months ago.)



Hitting it hard means I get hundreds of emails a day... they get auto-filtered into one of about 20 inboxes... I read them and sort them into one of about 300 folders. Some folders have around 10,000 messages in them... some of my regularly used folders have 3000 messages. And many messages have attachments of around a megabyte or two... so it is managing HUGE files.


My review: it only rarely crashes... maybe once every three weeks... and it seems to just be in the HTML rendering stuff... so, that is not too bothersome. More bothersome is its periodic "Writing changes to disk..." that can get strangely frequent after Mail's been open for a week or more... and that can turn Mail into a real performance dog!! I sometimes resort to quitting and restarting to get performance back to normal. A more minor complaint is that some attachments show up as "embedded" images, at which point getting to the actual attachment can be a nightmare. And there's some threading functionality from Eudora that I still miss.

Other than that, I've been VERY happy with Mail. The Junk filtering has been a lifesaver... it gets about 100-200/day... misses maybe 5-10/day... and very rarely has a false positive. And the rest of the functionality is a pleasure to use... email is pleasurable again (it was absolutely miserable before).

Jaguar Mail is NOT crash-proof... but it is adequately stable in my experience, even under very heavy usage. Sometime in the next month or two I'll be checking out Panther and Mail 1.3.


Brian

What are you wating for? I would upgrade to Panther. Even with all it's problems though several have been fixed it is by far the best version of OS X.

[kennedy]

Originally posted by typoon:
What are you wating for? I would upgrade to Panther. Even with all it's problems though several have been fixed it is by far the best version of OS X.

Well, its not just me... I have a whole company to switch over... I cannot afford the productivity losses of "all its problems", given we aren't really suffering any right now. And that's killing me... 'cuz the little boy in me really wants some of the nifty new stuff... but time is money... big time.

So, what am I waiting for? For a 10.3.x update to come out that MacNN posters rave about as being very stable and largely problem-free. Or at least not complaining about any specific problems that would cause me headaches.

Let me know if you think we're there! I sooo want to be... but haven't had time to watch the posts the last month or so.

[Ilja]

Well, I'm on Panther and Mail crashes not real often, but it does crash sometimes quite seriously. It happened a couple of times I actually lost all my IMAP emails and it started downloading everything from scratch. Luckily I'm on broadband, but I figure modem-users won't like it... Not even mentioning when it would happen with a POP account, since this will mean you will lose all your mail period... I think mail.app is more instable considering IMAP though.... I had it crashing on a particular message as well.

The most annoying bug for me is that custom folders aren't checked automatically (with an IMAP-account that is). I often find out that when i check my email through the webinterface that some custom folders contain new messages while Mail.app doesn't graphically say so. I have to open the particular folder and only then it starts downloading the new emails and will display the new emails. I'm not talking about the indicator on the icon on the dock, since I know it's a conscious choice not to include non-inbox messages, but I'm talking in the indicator next to a folder in the drawer, ie:

inbox (3)
custom-folder1 (4)
custom-folder2 (2)

in this case it will only recognize the new mail in the custom folders (and display the amount of new mail in between the brackets) after clicking on that folder...

[Love Calm Quiet]

Kennedy:
I'm running 10.3.1, having declined to upgrade to 10.3.2 because of a couple issues I've read about here that are specific to .2

I've not heard anything to suggest 10.3.1 provides instability (e.g., relative to Jaguar). I've never had Mail or Safari crash (tho I certainly don't process the volumes of mail you do). All the threads I read say Panther > Jag (esp after the FireWire firmware updates).

PS: I am IMPRESSED that you are able to do so much processing with Mail (or Eurdora for that matter) -- I hope they keep polishing it so that even folks like you ( & Ilja ) can push it to the limit and live "bullet-proof" (a theoretical idea in software experience).

Please pester Apple with some bug reports to keep the pressure on them for perfection as well as innovation.

[hotani]

Originally posted by Ilja:
Well, I'm on Panther and Mail crashes not real often, but it does crash sometimes quite seriously. It happened a couple of times I actually lost all my IMAP emails and it started downloading everything from scratch. Luckily I'm on broadband, but I figure modem-users won't like it... Not even mentioning when it would happen with a POP account, since this will mean you will lose all your mail period... I think mail.app is more instable considering IMAP though.... I had it crashing on a particular message as well.

The most annoying bug for me is that custom folders aren't checked automatically (with an IMAP-account that is). I often find out that when i check my email through the webinterface that some custom folders contain new messages while Mail.app doesn't graphically say so. I have to open the particular folder and only then it starts downloading the new emails and will display the new emails. I'm not talking about the indicator on the icon on the dock, since I know it's a conscious choice not to include non-inbox messages, but I'm talking in the indicator next to a folder in the drawer, ie:

inbox (3)
custom-folder1 (4)
custom-folder2 (2)

in this case it will only recognize the new mail in the custom folders (and display the amount of new mail in between the brackets) after clicking on that folder...

yes - mail is definitely wonky about IMAP accounts. I had mine crash several times over a specific message. I can get it to crash on command by selecting a bunch of messages to mark as junk; hit the "Junk" button and bye-bye mail.

My solution to this was to
1: drag the problematic message to the trash before mail tried to open it again, and...
2: turn off junk mail filtering. Sice I only accept messages from people in my address book, sending all others to a 'Spam' folder, the filtering really wasn't doing anything anyway. And many times it would mark a legit message as junk. der.

Having said that, Mozilla Thunderbird really is the best damn e-mail client out there. I just can't get over its hotmail-ish composition options of (choose one) HTML or plain text. Most messages I receive from other people just end up being displayed as plain text - seriously, who uses HTML to send messages but spammers? Not that it's a bad format for mail, just not widely used; which makes Thunderbird a plain-text-only mail client. That's annoying.

[parsec_kadets]

Originally posted by kennedy:
Well, its not just me... I have a whole company to switch over... I cannot afford the productivity losses of "all its problems", given we aren't really suffering any right now. And that's killing me... 'cuz the little boy in me really wants some of the nifty new stuff... but time is money... big time.

So, what am I waiting for? For a 10.3.x update to come out that MacNN posters rave about as being very stable and largely problem-free. Or at least not complaining about any specific problems that would cause me headaches.

Let me know if you think we're there! I sooo want to be... but haven't had time to watch the posts the last month or so.

I'm not sure there was ever a version of 10.2 that people on MacNN would have declared stable. Considering there are people who will claim that networking in 10.3 is totally unusable because they have to click a button twice, I would say that you'll be waiting for a very long time.

Don't get me wrong, there are problems with 10.3, and Windows networking is a big one. But people here have the fantastic ability to make a sparkler sound like a nuclear bomb. Right now I'm running 10.3.2 and my uptime is a few hours away from 31 days. And the restart I performed on Dec. 20th was due to a software update, not a crash. As for Mail, it has a form of threading, which you said you wanted. I have not noticed any crashes on my PB. Then again, I don't get nearly the volume of e-mail you do.

Finally, why would you have to switch over the entire company at the same time? Don't you have a machine somewhere that isn't used for any critical tasks that you could use an evaluation machine? That sounds a lot more reasonable to me than listening to a bunch of people you don't even know on some forum.

[kennedy]

Originally posted by parsec_kadets:
Finally, why would you have to switch over the entire company at the same time? Don't you have a machine somewhere that isn't used for any critical tasks that you could use an evaluation machine? That sounds a lot more reasonable to me than listening to a bunch of people you don't even know on some forum.

All that you say is valid... and what I do. I judge the amount of complaint about what kind of problems and decide whether its worth my time to take what risk.

And yes, I will test it myself first... I have a whole test network, server and clients... it lives there for a couple weeks before I switch over the company. But I am just too damned busy... so, I do a periodic risk/reward guestimate and so far I haven't been compelled. But that may change soon...

Brian