Comments on: The problem with Mail

By: Jay P.

Jay P. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:08:37 +0000

I have two question about work arounds and what happens next when an ISP is busy, and mail assumes the password is incorrect and annoyingly asks for it over and over again.

When this has happened for me, I go into my outbox, reopen the message and hit send again. It usually goes, but it’s an extreme time sink. If I don’t do anything, and then send future messages, they go, but the initial one stays sitting in the outbox. It seems like Mail doesn’t know to try and send it again, later. Is there a setting to tell it to?

2) The send function itself seems extremely slow. Even messages sent over ethernet seem to take 10-15 seconds to get out of the box. Any thoughts on why this is? I do have a lot of mail in various mailboxes, and I’m not clear on how this might impact the performance of the outbox.

Thanks!

By: Alex Piotrowski

Alex Piotrowski — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 03:40:02 +0000

I have the same problem as Wollie Wolcott: I have different email address that use the same server(s) in order to keep work, school, and personal matters seperate. Mail won’t let me use the same server for more than one account, which defeats the purpose of having seperate addresses on the same server. It’s frustrating. I’m still new to Apple, maybe I’m missing something, but at this point I still need to use the PC if I want to get all my mail.

By: Devere

Devere — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:24:22 +0000

I HAVE NEVER ONCE BEEN ABLE TO USE MY APPLE EMAIL IN TWO YEARS. Password problems. That along with other problems with my g4 ibook and lack of service is why I will no longer go back to Apple again at this point.

By: Edwardo

Edwardo — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 18:17:15 +0000

Hello. If anyone can help me with this issue I would be most grateful! I am a headhunter. Filemaker Pro is my resume DB. I can email directly out of filemaker pro by pressing the EMAIL THIS RESUME button. When I do this the email that gets created does NOT have my signature on it…I must click the dropdown every time….It worked like a champ in Eudora. Every other email I create automatically has my sig in it?
Thanks,
Ed

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:31:40 +0000

Tony (19), I had the exact same problem. Here’s how I solved it. With mail open I looked for an offending file folder, which for me was Drafts. I determined that because all the other folders created the “Reading Mail Folders” message, but Drafts was the only one which did not. I assumed that when I deleted the too large file and closed the application within a couple of minutes, Mail tried to save the file as a draft.

To fix it, (took ten hours to figure it out) I went to Finder, selected my account on the left panel — the one with the House icon — selected Library, selected Mail, selected Mailbox, and dragged the file “Drafts.mbox” to the trash and emptied the trash. It fixed my problem instantly. When I reopened Mail, there was still a Drafts folder, and everything worked like it was supposed to. I think that when you delete a too huge file, you must leave the application open for a while to let the cashe empty fully.

By: Taktmann

Taktmann — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 13:05:36 +0000

@Tony: I have no experience with a case like that, but I would suggest figuring out the process-id (id’s?) of Mail.app in Terminal (top) and then kill them (kill -9 process-id#).

If this helps, try to restart Mail.app. If it tries to resume sending the monster-mail, kill it again and then trash some plist-files belonging to Mail.app (be careful though not deleting some vital information).

Just my two cents.

By: Tony

Tony — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 10:00:05 +0000

I have a similar problem.
I accidently attached a folder of 127Mb to an e-mail and hit the send button. It has been trying to send the mail for over 15 hours now on and off.
Mail quits itself and asks if I wish to report it to Apple. I haven’t done that yet.
I have used Force Quit, re-booted, re-set the Pram, re-set permissions, all without having any effect on the spinning wheel. It is still trying to send this damn file.
I have also highlighte the file and hit the delete button which visably has an effect, but the wheel keeps spinning and eventually the file re-appears in the out box again with mail trying to send it. PLEASE HELP.

By: Preston Smith

Preston Smith — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 00:40:16 +0000

I use gmail, and my lovely Mail.app picks up the mail and delivers it to me. There is one problem. Some processes freeze up after they get finished (or as “finished” as they can be) and they are stuck where they are, for example, I left some draft windows open and then quit mail without closing them. When I restarted Mail, the little bar which explain the active process told me it was “Reading mailbox file. . .” Well it has been “Reading mailbox file. . .” for about two hours. It doesn’t hinder other processes, but it sure gets annoying, and the worst thing is, I can’t quit Mail, I just had to force quit it. I checked out the “Activity Viewer” and it told me that it was “Reading mailbox file. . .” (see, it gets annoying after reading that three times) and there was a completion bar telling me how much of the activity had been completed. It looked fully complete to me. I pressed the stop button next to the bar, and it did nothing. I force quit and tried again, still no results. Can anyone help me with this nasty problem?

By: Martin Brown

Martin Brown — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 09:31:44 +0000

On auto checking:

My beef here is that we have basically all or nothing. Sure, I can switch off auto-checking for an account, but that’s not what I want. I want some accounts (like my personal ones) to be checked every hour, while my main business accounts to be check, say, every 15 minutes.

In Mail, I have two choices, I can switch checking on (and then ALL accounts are checked at the SAME time and the same interval), or I can switch them off.

By: Martin Brown

Martin Brown — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 09:29:14 +0000

To Renaud:

You can always change the ’senders’ email account on a message while composing it; there’s a popup on the left hand side, just above the message body (the signature popup is on the right hand side).

By: Steve J

Steve J — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 08:47:07 +0000

The thing which I appreciate in Entourage, which I recently migrated back to, is the ability to simply drag a message to the desktop. It is saved with any attachments. Impossible in Mail.app. Sure you can “Save As” the Mail.app message but this invariably gives rise to formatting problems if saved as .rtf (ie the body of the message is virtually always formatted as bold).

Love the rapid searching in Mail.app. Dreadfully slow and complex in Entourage.

Poor html rendering in Mail, good in Entourage.

And yes the signatures issue as above is a pain in Mail.

By: Renaud SAvignard

Renaud SAvignard — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 08:34:13 +0000

Hi,
In Outlook or Entourage, I can choose the account from which I send a message, even if i’m connected through enother account.
This doesn’t seem to be possible in Mail : for example, sending a business-related mail from home, with the “business” account address appearing in th sender’s address.
Did I miss something ?

By: Wollie Wolcott

Wollie Wolcott — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 05:36:13 +0000

I like Mail’s simplicity. I do have one beef though. I have 4 accounts on Earthlinks server for myself, my wife and kids, however, I can only access one (mine) from mail. The POP server continually rejects the account passwords. I contacted Earthlink and the passwords are correct. Does anyone have any suggestions?

By: OS X

OS X — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 01:58:30 +0000

> I’ve got accounts that I really don’t care about unless I
> specifically go looking for email, but Mail checks them
> just as frequently as the ones I am interested in whether I
> like it or not.

Turn off auto check for that account. Easy!
http://home.earthlink.net/~skellener/misc/mail.jpg

Also, as far as “read” and “unread” mail, you can always simply shift+command+U to set a message back to “unread” status.

I’ve been using Mail.app since the days of NeXTSTEP. I still find it today to be the best email package on the planet!

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 00:43:20 +0000

The thing that drives me batty is no *real* default mail account. Depending on which email I last read, the mail program will start my next new email from THAT account, and not the default account. In *cough* Outlook Express on my PC, before I switched a year ago, I would always send from my default account, unless I selected a different account from my drop down. Now it’s the opposite…if Mail decides I’m sending from a second or third account, I have to manually select my default account from the drop down menu.

Frustrating.

By: Paul Westbrook

Paul Westbrook — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 20:28:07 +0000

Someone has written a plugin that will automatically select the signature when you are composing a new message. It is called MailEnhancer

I have written an AppleScript that tells mail to check all of the mail folders for new mail. I have posted it here. The script tells Mail to update the folders every 5 minutes. It could me modified to do something different.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 20:10:37 +0000

My only real beef with Mail.app is how it bogs down once you have a boatload of messages in your mailboxes. Speed is king on my 1GHz Powerbook!

By: Rich

Rich — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:57:58 +0000

I’ve also wished Apple would fix it’s problems with multiple signatures. I used to use Entourage and it supported it without a problem (sometimes, that’s how I would tell which account at a glance that someone was replying to.) Believe it or not, I’ve actually had a problem in my past where someone thought I was speaking on behalf of an organization I belonged to because my default signature included that I was an officer in that organization. Ever since then, I’ve been careful about my signature.

By: Nathan Dintenfass

Nathan Dintenfass — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:46:04 +0000

When I first tried mail, one tiny detail that basically killed the deal is how mail marks messages as “read” immediately upon bringing focus. All other mail programs I’ve ever used allow you to set how many seconds of focus must pass before marking a message as “read” — I have long depended on that to quickly scan mail but keep messages marked as “unread” (which is how I know to go back to them). I found it incredibly annoying to not have that feature in Mail.

By: Kevin Ballard

Kevin Ballard — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:40:48 +0000

There’s a third-party Mail plugin called MailEnhancer which lets you have default signatures per account. Just name the signature after the email address for the account and MailEnhancer will select that signature when you select that account to send from.

In the Advanced tab of account preferences you can remove an account from the automatic check. This way when you want to read that account you can do a manual check, but when you don’t care it won’t check.

By: Martin Brown

Martin Brown — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:33:18 +0000

‘Automatically synchronize mail folders’ has never worked reliably for me; usually it ends up freezing Mail to the point of needing a Force Quit. For some reason it doesn’t do the same as ‘Synchronize all accounts’ does. It’s not even an ISP problem, as it’s synchronizing to a machine on the LAN.

As to the ‘remembers for an entire session’; your right, it does, but that means it tries again when it wakes from sleep, or, if I’m using dial-up, tries again when I disconnect and reconnect each time.

It *should* remember it until I tell it otherwise, not until /it/ thinks everything is OK.

By: Anthony Papineau

Anthony Papineau — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:09:35 +0000

The signatures but was my biggest complaint since 10.1 came out and I gave them ‘feedback’ about it back then.

I also use IMAP with server side filtering, however I have set “Automatically syncronize mail folders” in the ‘Advanced’ settings for the account and it does show me that I have unread mail automatically.

Lastly, I also move around between multiple ISP’s. I agree it is annoying when you don’t have a connection, however when you are changing between connections and have different SMTP requirements at each location, Mail.app handles this really well. At work I can’t access my personal ISP’s SMTP server, and at home I can ONLY access my personal ISP’s mail server. When it can’t access the server it says “Do you want to try with this other server” and it remembers it for the entire session, so I don’t have to keep telling it what to do.

By: Josh Pigford

Josh Pigford — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 16:49:08 +0000

My number 1 complaint is that evil problem with signatures…just seems like a no brainer to have that feature.

By: Winsor

Winsor — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 16:40:26 +0000

Mine does too, but I have concluded it is the ISP, not Mail. If the mail server is busy or blocked for a moment and does not accept the password, Mail thinks the one it sent must be wrong.

By: Chris B.

Chris B. — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 15:54:24 +0000

I would like to add one more thing to this list. I hate that Mail always seems to “forget” my password. Almost everyday I get that ridiculous bouncing icon, that won’t stop until I atleast move to Mail and indicate that I see that it needs me to enter my email password. It drives me freaking crazy. I have tried other apps like Thunderbird, but I am too picky about certain things, that only Mail provides. Hopefully they have fixed these problems in Tiger.