Panther’s Mail: Duplicate messages when the application crashes between indexing cycles

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
February 12th, 2004 • 6:32 am

I am not sure exactly when Mail decides to update the (invisible) index for a mailbox — apart from when you are actually viewing it. Unfortunately, this means that if

  1. you select a message in box A
  2. move the message to box B
  3. have a Mail application crash or freeze that forces you to relaunch the application soon after that

more often than not you’ll find, upon relaunching Mail, the message you thought you had moved is still in box A — but it is also in box B! In other words, Mail did move the message to box B, but “forgot” to remove it from box A — even though it looked like it did when you moved the message.

I suspect that is because the index for box A is not updated immediately, and if the crash occurs soon enough after the message was moved, Mail literally forgets that the message was moved at all.

It probably is a problem in the design of the Mail engine itself — and wouldn’t be a problem at all if Mail never crashed. But Mail does crash. Fortunately, it never has nasty consequences (not in my experience), such as lost messages. But the crashes can lead to duplicate messages on occasion, which should not happen.


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