Mail 2.0: Takes long time to create reply when network connection is busy

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Mail
November 22nd, 2005 • 11:50 am

This is another example of a problem that is new in Mail 2.0 (as far as I can tell) and that illustrates Apple’s lack of concern for people with dial-up Internet connections, which I have already discussed elsewhere.

The problem only occurs when you want to reply to a message that contains attachments. And it only occurs when your dial-up connection is currently saturated (because you are downloading a large file, for example).

In that particular situation, when you select a message that contains attachments and hit the “Reply” button or press command-R to create a reply to that particular message, if your Internet connection happens to be saturated, then Mail takes an abnormally long time to open the window with the new reply. I am talking about 10 seconds or more.

It really looks as if, when you hit the “Reply” button or press command-R to create a reply, Mail actually needs to check something on-line and, because the Internet connection is saturated, it takes a while before Mail can get through and access whatever it needs to access.

This doesn’t make any sense, of course. Why would Mail need to access the Internet at that particularly time? I am not talking about using an IMAP account. I am talking about a good old POP3 account where the messages are transferred to your local hard drive and you should be able to compose a reply even if you are not connected to the Internet.

Yet somehow, when the original message contains an attachment, Mail 2.0 seems to need to access the Internet at the time it creates the reply, and the saturation of the connection can cause a significant slow-down. (If the Internet connection is not saturated, the reply appears right away.)

I reported this problem to Apple a long time ago, but, as is the case with most problems that primarily affect dial-up users, Apple doesn’t seem to care one bit. I suspect that no one at Apple actually bothers to test their products with a dial-up connection unless they are held at gun point, and even then… Problems that only affect dial-up users simply don’t seem to be a priority at Apple. It’s an elitist attitude, or at least that’s the way I perceive it. And nothing that Apple has done in recent years has caused me to change my perception of this.

Maybe there is a way to monitor the TCP/IP connection to see if Mail 2.0 does actually try to access the Internet when you create a reply to an existing message with an attachment. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with Mail mistakenly using a procedure specific to IMAP accounts when composing replies with a POP3 account. But I have no way of checking this, because I have no idea how to monitor a TCP/IP connection and identify such a behaviour.


4 Responses to “Mail 2.0: Takes long time to create reply when network connection is busy”

  1. ssp says:

    If you want to watch your IP connections, I can recommend any of the following

    LittleSnitch
    You can download a demo of this which’ll run for an hour or so, enough to do whatever you have in mind. It can be set up to open a dialogue box whenever an application wants to make a connection, specifying the destination IP and port in the process.

    If you want even more information you can get

    Eavesdrop
    which is free and a ‘little’ rough around the edges. It’ll log all (? anyway enough with a tendency of more than enough) of your IP traffic giving sources and destinations of connections and even letting you look at the data transferred. The good thing is it has a GUI…

    … if you don’t want that, I recommend tcpdump and its man page on the command line. Some guy in my hall a few years back demonstrated to me how you can snoop all the traffic on the local (non-switched) network with that tool. He did this at the very moment that my computer was sending the password to check my e-mail, leaving me a bit shocked. If I should pinpoint the moment when I started being a bit paranoid about encrypting everything going out of my computer it’d be that one.

    P.S. I just tried the Eavesdrop tool. My first hint would be that it works best if you quit as many applications with network connections as possible before running it as you’ll see all of the connections which can make it tricky to find the one you’re interested in as there doesn’t seem to be the name / PID of the application using that connection in the data.

    P.P.S. I suppose that the problem you’re referring to is a different one, but that test of mine revealed that Mail does indeed open an http connection _if_ (i) the message’s recipient has a mac.com address, (ii) you have encryption enabled and (iii) you’ve checked that .Mac checkbox in your keychain preferences that I mentione It loads a page à la http://certinfo.mac.com/lookup?igot which returns the certificate for that user – apparently Mail’s way of automatically getting the certificate for you :)

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    Interesting. I have LittleSnitch and I deleted its rule for Mail. I then saturated my Internet connection with a big download, launched Mail, and tried to reply to a message with a large attachment. Again, I got the long delay, and no complaints from LittleSnitch about Mail trying to access the net.

    So it looks like it’s related to Internet traffic, but not an actual attempt to access the net—possibly Mail waiting for some other background process or application to do something over the net before proceeding with its own stuff?

    Also, the delay seems proportional to the size of the attachment. The larger the attachment, the longer the delay. And during the delay the activity viewer window shows “Loading message data.”

    As well, if I repeat the same operation a second time immediately after the first, with the same message, this time there is no delay, as if something had now become cached.

    Very strange.

    I guess I’ll have to explore the more hard-core troubleshooting tools. Thanks for your suggestion. As for Mail accessing the net to check a certificate, I would expect this to be normal :).

  3. ssp says:

    Perhaps it’s just a decoding issue of the attachment. Mail decodes the whole message so it can put the quoted original text into your reply? Things might be cached or something, giving a faster second attempt. I wouldn’t see how that it related to the Internet connection being saturated, though.

    The certificate download thing must be new. Usually certificates are stored in your keychain and are (automatically) placed there by Mail when you receive a signed message. That new service means you can send encrypted messages (to .Mac users who have a certificate issued to them) without them ever having sent you a signed message. That’s quite good for ease of use IMO. But of course it’s quite limited as it’ll only work for .Mac recipients…

  4. Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Apple Mail and dial-up: Two unhappy users says:

    […] Pierre Igot at Betalogue has discovered a design flaw in the way Mail.app handles replies that “illustrates Apple’s lack of concern for people with dial-up Internet connections”: In that particular situation, when you select a message that contains attachments and hit the “Reply” button or press Command-R to create a reply to that particular message, if your Internet connection happens to be saturated, then Mail takes an abnormally long time to open the window with the new reply. I am talking about 10 seconds or more. Technorati Tags: Mail.app, dialup, Apple Mail, Mail.app, dial-up […]

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