[scip]

The Apple Mail program is unlike most mail clients in that when you delete established account settings, it also deletes the mailboxes associated with the account, thereby deleting all the user's mail.

This is a real problem, as I have found it necessary to reestablish the mail account settings to restore the mail client to working status. What I've had to do was leave the old account settings in place, but making them inactive (taking out the password and mail server settings) and adding in a new account to restore a working installation of Mail.

There also seem to be no tools available to repair a corrupted mailbox that I can find. I've had an issue where a user got an error about "compaction" and couldn't get her mail.

What was Apple thinking when they made this program?

[gorickey]

Originally posted by scip:
What was Apple thinking when they made this program?

To make it absolutely perfect and NEVER, I say NEVER have any problems at all and make EVERYBODY, I say EVERYBODY the happiest little camper in the world....

Are you saying they didn't accomplish that?

[scip]

Originally posted by gorickey:
To make it absolutely perfect and NEVER, I say NEVER have any problems at all and make EVERYBODY, I say EVERYBODY the happiest little camper in the world....

Are you saying they didn't accomplish that?

No, I'm not saying that at all. However, the program is very un-Maclike. To me, Entourage is a better-behaved/functioning program than Apple's Mail.

Apple's Mail keeps copies on the server by default, whereas just about every other program does not unless you specifically set that feature.

It just seems like it shys away from convention, which does cause problems when you are in a support function (as I am) and have to deal with people's mailboxes going over quota due to messages being left on the server, etc, and doing routine troubleshooting, which is to delete the existing settings and recreate them (I had to do this today to get a user able to receive her mail again, which is why I'm so hot on the topic). This is not acceptable to lose mail for just deleting the account settings. They really should allow you to delete the account settings but leave the existing mail in the program.

I know/understand/accept that no software program is perfect, I just think Apple really dropped the ball with Mail, in that it's feature set and conventions are not up to par with everything else that is out there today.

Just My $.02

[dtriska]

Um, if you're keeping email on the server, and you delete the account, why shouldn't Mail remove the mailboxes residing on the server of the account you deleted?

[scip]

Originally posted by dtriska:
Um, if you're keeping email on the server, and you delete the account, why shouldn't Mail remove the mailboxes residing on the server of the account you deleted?

I'm not keeping mail on the server, thus when you delete the account settings, Mail deletes the .mbox files on the local machine, which deletes all the user's mail.

My point is that this is not a good implementation, as other mail programs (on both the Mac & PC) leave the messages alone if you delete the account settings...which is sometimes necessary in routine troubleshooting.