Mac OS X’s Mail: SHUT UP!
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshApril 9th, 2003 • 1:50 am
I am quickly reaching boiling point with Mac OS X’s Mail application these days. And the reason is extremely simple. I have had enough of all these obnoxious, useless, erroneous, irritating, intrusive, idiotic error messages telling me that my email account password is wrong or that the server could not be reached.
All my passwords are fine, and the reasons the servers cannot be reached is through Mail’s own bloody fault! It’s not smart enough to handle my limited bandwidth properly and whenever it’s receiving or sending a large attachment, all other email checking operations keep failing with these stupid error messages.
Of course, the fact that I have to monitor 18 different email accounts and that there is no way, in Mail, to change the default mail checking period for each account separately doesn’t help. You have one setting that applies to all accounts. Of course I need to check my main account much more often than I need to check some of these other accounts. Grrr…
To make matters worse, the error messages are bloody modal dialog boxes and, if Mail happens to be in the background, they cause this idiotic behavior of the Mail icon high-bouncing in the Dock, which pretty much forces you to switch to Mail right away to dismiss the dialog box. Try doing this 18 times!
The whole approach is wrong — and, once again, the victims are mostly modem users with limited bandwidth such as myself.
I would switch to another email client, but there isn’t one that suits my needs. Mail is way overdue for a major upgrade, and I sure as hell hope that the next one will fix this idiotic behavior in low-bandwidth, multiple-account situations.