Weird behaviour of Apple Mail

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1

Some probably know that I’m a virtually life-long user of Eudora for
my email needs. I’ve been trying out Apple’s Mail, despite the way it
choked up completely when I tried importing my Eudora archives some
time ago. This time, I’ve set it up to deal with a couple of accounts
(my Mac.com one and my college email), and it has run like that for
perhaps six months.

I just tried a simple search for something that I knew without a
shadow of a doubt was in more than one email. This didn’t work as
expected. (Although as this has happened before perhaps I should
expect it…)

First of all the name “Ian”, trying to track down emails sent by a
particular Ian here at college. I did this search because, when I
sorted both mailboxes by Sender, he didn’t appear in the ‘I’ section
of either list.
Doing this search didn’t pull up any of his emails OR emails where he
was Cc-ed. And yes, I was searching “All Mailboxes” and “Entire
Message”.

I then searched for “Euroskills”, with and without a capital letter.
I got one email back in the result, although it is text that has been
written explicitly in a number of different messages.

I flicked back and forth between the two main mailboxes a couple of
times, and eventually Mail showed me Ian’s emails. Why on earth
didn’t it show them before? Anyway, I tried copying the word
“Euroskills” directly from his email and pasting that into the Search
field…

Nope, didn’t find it, just one other email that also mentioned it, as before.

What in the everlovin’ blue-eyed world is UP with THIS? It isn’t
Leopard’s version of Mail, but it is the updated Tiger’s Mail.
Frankly, I don’t see how any sane person could put up with that. So
what’s up? It has to be something out of the ordinary, right? Except
it isn’t an isolated incident.

Comments? Thoughts? Scorn?

k

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2

On 9 Oct 2008, at 19:31, Keith Martin wrote:

Comments? Thoughts? Scorn?

I’ve been using Mail pretty exclusively since Panther, and it’s been
fairly okay.

It does, however, occasionally throw a wobbly with mailboxes that
might contain vast quantities of email.

In the first instance, I’d be tempted to try rebuilding those
mailboxes. Select a mailbox in the left panel, then choose Rebuild
from the bottom of the Mailbox menu.

Depending on the number of emails and the speed of your Mac, go have a
cuppa and read the paper. I’m serious here, because my experience has
been that if you pretend the OS is actually multitasking and
multithreaded and try and do something else as Mail is hogging all
your CPU cycles while rebuilding, bad stuff can happen (like badly
corrupted mailboxes that end up no use to man nor beast).

When you get back, the mailbox might contain a few more emails than it
started out with. If it doesn’t, and searching or Spotlight doesn’t
turn them up, then I’m not sure what the next stage is.

Hope that helps.

Heather

“Freeway - Web Design for All”

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Sometime around 9/10/08 (at 20:04 +0100) Heather Kavanagh said:

I’ve been using Mail pretty exclusively since Panther, and it’s been
fairly okay.

It does, however, occasionally throw a wobbly with mailboxes that
might contain vast quantities of email.

Thanks for this Heather, this is very useful feedback.

It confirms my long-held beliefs that Mail simply isn’t up to the job
when it comes to me and my email. This actually represents less
than six months’ worth of email. Eudora has years of email archived
and accessible, and it doesn’t slow down.

A quick check over some of my active Eudora mailboxes show they have
from 9000 to almost 15,000 emails in each one (for example there are
11475 in my Freewaytalk 2008 mailbox), all searchable at high speed
and without ‘forgetting’ anything. The only corruption I’ve seen was
around 1999 when a disk went sour on me, not through the cumulative
effects of normal day-to-day use!

Ahh heck, I shouldn’t rant. But I will be switching back to Eudora.

k

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4

Just to offer the converse, I have been using Mail forever, a brief
dalliance with the BareBones product notwithstanding, and used
nothing but Eudora in Mac OS < X. My Freeway mailbox has 26,405
messages in it at the moment, inbox has 11,345, my Archive folder has
10,675, my Ruby-talk folder has 134,517 messages in it (so glad I
switched to Web-only on that one!). There is a mighty lag when
switching between some of these monsters, but nothing that is too
onerous. This is all on a dual 1.25 G4, with nothing special in the
way of memory or disk. I tried others, but really have come back to
Mail time and again. Plus it makes things much simpler with the iPhone.

Walter

On Oct 9, 2008, at 4:09 PM, Keith Martin wrote:

A quick check over some of my active Eudora mailboxes show they
have from 9000 to almost 15,000 emails in each one (for example
there are 11475 in my Freewaytalk 2008 mailbox), all searchable at
high speed and without ‘forgetting’ anything.

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