Sometimes the sheer stupidity of how Mail handles (or rather cannot handle) network failures just boggles my mind. A couple of days ago I heard that people using one particular ISP in our area (the cable company Eastlink) were experiencing a general system failure and did not have any Internet access for several hours. Then […]
I recently bought an iPad Air to replace my old, first-generation iPad, and this means that I have finally been able to upgrade to iOS 7. iOS 7 is a very mixed bag as far as I am concerned (I have to agree with Jared Sinclair, for example), but if there is one thing that has been […]
No review of real-world usage of the iPad as a multi-purpose device (i.e. as a laptop replacement) would be complete without a close examination of how the device handles e-mail communication. One key issue with mobile devices in general, including laptops, is configurability and adaptability. One of the main reasons why so many people use […]
There’s one small thing about the real world out there that Apple’s software designers seem to have a hard time understanding: sometimes servers fail. They become temporarily inaccessible. A racoon eats through an optic fibre cable. Lightning strikes. In other words, shit happens. Unfortunately, this means that, when shit does happen, Apple’s software offers, well, […]
Messages in transit in UI limbo…
In my personal experience, there is a major problem with using e-mail as a communication tool in a professional environment. The problem is simple: people don’t acknowledge receipt. E-mail communication is not 100% reliable and there are many situations where one really needs to know very quickly whether someone has received one’s e-mail message or […]
Right now I am staying in a nice hotel in England. It’s an old building on a nice 6-acre property in the English countryside. Since it is a rather fancy hotel, however, it also has to have modern amenities, including high-speed Internet access. Internet access in the hotel is provided through Liberty-i Wireless Broadband Internet. […]
Mac OS X Server still has a way to go before it can claim to be a truly user-friendly server OS, i.e. a server OS that can be managed by an administrator without requiring knowledge of arcane Unix commands. Here’s an example I ran into yesterday. I use Panther Server’s Mail service on my Xserve. […]
I just had a problem that unfortunately contradicts my initial impression about improvements made to the way Mail handles errors while connecting to an SMTP server in order to send a mail message. Here’s the situation. I was composing a reply to someone’s message when Mail started checking my mail in all my accounts. In […]
If you use Mail with a modem connection, you’ve probably encountered this situation from time to time. You write a message in Mail and want to send it, but it just so happens that your limited bandwidth is being monopolized by a downloading process somewhere in another application (Safari, FTP application, etc.). When you click […]
Today appears to be a day of major irritants. After Radio basically doing whatever it pleases, now Mail decides that it doesn’t want to send my messages out anymore… I get the typical “Sending failed. Do you want to try with a different SMTP server?” alert. I don’t want to try with a different SMTP […]
This is not the first time it has happened to me… I tried to send a simple message, and, instead of sending it, Mail got back to me with a dialog warning me that the connection to my regular SMTP server had been rejected and asking me whether I wanted to try again later or […]
I am afraid I am being forced to curtail my on-line activities somewhat. Since Monday, February 2, my pseudo-high speed Internet hook-up via satellite has been on the fritz. It might not have been a coincidence that, on that day, after several weeks of very cold weather, we had milder temperatures, which caused all kinds […]
Time to say goodbye to dial-up.
Some days, living in a cave does sound tempting.