Comments on: Mail 2.0: ’0 messages, 3 unread’

By: danridley

danridley — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 18:26:39 +0000

Paul: Okay, I misread your message. Ignore me.

By: Paul Ingraham

Paul Ingraham — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 17:33:22 +0000

Dan: just to clarify, it wasn’t just my message count that was screwy… my messages were gone. Nothing at all in the message list. And no amount of waiting would solve the problem. “Waiting” was my first troubleshooting instinct, of course, but thirty seconds, two minutes, ten minutes… nothing was enough. Once I left it for 45 minutes while I went out to run an errand, and Mail was exactly as I had left it, with an empty message list and a zero message count. Definitely more than just sluggish message count updating!

By: danridley

danridley — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 02:38:51 +0000

Yeah, I was responding more to Paul Ingraham‘s comment there than to the main entry. I do think your issue was different (and your force quite was hard-earned).

By: MacMove

MacMove — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 01:48:46 +0000

Which raises another issue: How will such bugs ever get fixed if the bug reporting process is so heavily focused on easily reproducible situations? I didn’t make this particular situation up. It really did happen to me. And it happened in the course of using Mail. But I don’t know how to reproduce it reliably. Does it mean it’s not an important bug? I don’t think so… Yet right now, that’s exactly what it is.

I think that being non-reproducable is a primary reason to categorize a bug as unimportant.

Aside from the fact that non-reproducable bugs are a pain to troubleshoot (virtually impossible, actually), they deserve to be shuffled to the bottom of the pile. There are probably dozens of confirmed, reproducable bugs in Mail that deserve the attention of developers more than this one does!

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 21:10:54 +0000

Dan: Yeah, I waited for several minutes in case this endless sorting process would eventually… sort itself out. But it never did. After five minutes, I felt I was entitled to a force-quit.

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 20:48:37 +0000

I really don’t think that using a simple command such as Remove Attachments while Mail is checking for new mail in the background should have such disastrous consequences. My suspicion here is that I actually removed the attachments on a thread of messages that included a new message that had just arrived during the process of checking for new mail that Mail was still in the process of completing. The e-mail was already there visible in my Inbox, but maybe because the full mail checking process wasn’t complete yet (I have a dozen different accounts, which can take a little while over dial-up), something screwy happened because Mail was still in the process of “filtering” or recompiling the message list—even though, as I said, the message in question was already visible in the message list.

In any case, the problem here is probably that Apple engineers spend very little time—if any—testing Mail with a dial-up connection. This kind of stuff never happens to them, because they check their e-mail accounts over broadband and the e-mail checking process gets completed in ittle time, given them very little opportunity to actually do something while the process is still in progress.

It’s no excuse, but it’s probably the explanation for the persistence of such problems in Mail.

By: danridley

danridley — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 20:45:37 +0000

Mail has always seemed vey lazy about keeping its message counts updated. I very frequently get mismatches like this temporarily; and it’s exacerbated by the fact that my IMAP server (which I run) is often overloaded and slow. So far, however, it’s always caught up to itself if I left it alone for 30 seconds or so.

By: Paul Ingraham

Paul Ingraham — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 15:48:13 +0000

I saw something similar to this bug at least six times in the space of a few hours last week when I was migrating from Entourage to Mail. I was able to quit, however, which is obviously a significant difference. Relaunching the application resolved the problem immediately each time.

Nevertheless, it was a little creepy to see that “0 messages” every time it happened when I knew perfectly well that there were rather a lot more messages than that.

I couldn’t reproduce the bug, but I was certainly doing some unusual operations that day, pushing the application fairly hard, creating and deleting a lot of folders, dragging and dropping huge selections, etc, all part of getting organizing — stuff I won’t be doing from day to day with Mail, but at the same time stuff that it really shouldn’t have trouble with. These kinds of operations may not be routine, but they are also occasionally essential.

I migrated to Mail with my eyes wide open, expecting trouble… and I wasn’t disappointed.

By: Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Betalogue: Two more Mail.app annoyances

Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Betalogue: Two more Mail.app annoyances — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 00:40:51 +0000

[...] Mail 2.0: ‘0 messages, 3 unread’ — By doing several complicated things at once, he brings Mail.app’s multi-threading ability to its knees. It shouldn’t happen, it shouldn’t be so hard to discover that the app has stalled and it shouldn’t be so difficult to unstick it. [...]

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 19:01:53 +0000

Interesting stuff :). I haven’t noticed the Control key modifying any menus anywhere else either. As for the Dock menu for the Finder itself, I suspect that the Option key can be used to modify menu items after pulling the menu down only if the changes don’t alter the actual layout of the menu. The “Relaunch” command that gets added when you option-click on the Finder’s Dock menu is actually a new command that is added to the bottom of the menu. Mac OS X is probably not designed to be able to redraw the entire menu after it’s been pulled down (or up in this particular case).

By: danridley

danridley — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 16:41:47 +0000

Oh, I should mention that in Finder, Ctrl also modifies the menu in one spot; changing Get Info into Get Summary Info. As far as I know, this is just a Finder weirdness, I haven’t seen Ctrl have similar behavior anywhere else.

There’s another Finder uniqueness with the Option thing too: since it doesn’t have a “Quit” item on its Dock menu, you can’t open its Dock menu and then hit Option if you need to Relaunch it. Instead, you need to already have Option held down when you open its Dock menu, in which case Relaunch will appear. As far as I know, Finder is the only application where it matters whether you press Option before opening the menu, as opposed to after.

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 14:42:11 +0000

Thanks, wasn’t aware of this feature at all. Again, I don’t suspect many Mac users know about this. But it’s good to know :).

By: danridley

danridley — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 04:24:09 +0000

You can always force-quit an application from its Dock menu by holding Option; that’ll turn the “normal” Quit menu item into a Force Quit menu item. (There are arguments about the discoverability of the Option-holding thing, but it’s used widely in menus to do “the same thing, but bigger.” Option turns Minimize into Minimize All; Get Info into Show Inspector; Open With into Always Open With; Close Window into Close All Windows… In its favor, it’s visible; you can press and release Option and see the menu items change before your eyes.)