Lost text in mail.app

August 6, 2005 10:52 PM

Is anyone else losing text in OS X mail app?

I occasionally lose text in mail I send using OS X mail app and smtp.mac.com as the smtp server. I lose anywhere from a couple sentences to several paragraphs with the lost text starting and ending in the middle of words. Google turns up references to lost text in Safari, but nothing about Mail.

posted by forrest to computers & internet (13 comments total)

I have twice lost approximately 6 months of email. Slurp. *belch*. Gone.

Haven't seen the partial text loss while composing/sending, though, except... when you highlight text within an email, and then respond to that email, rather than quoting the whole message, it will only quote your highlighted text. Took me a while to figure that.

At any rate, I'm now shopping for a replacement for Mail.app. "First, lose no data" oughta be rule #1, and it's apparently not.
posted by weston at 12:30 AM on August 7, 2005

Weird... I use mail pretty much constantly, and have never had lost mail of any sort, on my .Mac account or any of my other accounts.

Do you mean that what you have in the sent mail folder doesn't match what's received? If so I'll cook up a test next week to send a shitload of messages, and checksum them on the recipient side.

It's hard to imagine a bug that could manifest itself in that manner...
posted by mosch at 12:48 AM on August 7, 2005

Sorry to derail a bit from the question at hand, but to weston: Give Thunderbird a try. I've been using it for over a year, and it's worked flawlessly.
posted by sellout at 2:03 AM on August 7, 2005

Does thunderbird have a smaller footprint? I only have 384mb in my ibook, and mail is a massive resource hog.
posted by craniac at 3:00 AM on August 7, 2005

This sounds more like a problem on the SMTP server side, or a bad network connection -- are you using wireless or a funky dialup line? I've head lots of complaints about Mail.app, but I've used it for 3 years with absolutely no problems, and with HUGE mailboxes, including (routinely) 4500 or so messages, many with attachments, in my inbox. Losing batches of entire messages may have to do with your server synchronization settings. It's an inelegant application compared to some, but for me it's always been reliable.

There is a "rebuild" command for mailboxes under the Mailbox menu. If you seem to be missing messages give that a try.
posted by realcountrymusic at 5:43 AM on August 7, 2005

I've never had this problem, either. I currently have more than 45,000 messages in all my mailboxes.
posted by Mo Nickels at 8:52 AM on August 7, 2005

I've never had it lose parts of emails.

I used entourage until Tiger. The use of Spotlight kills every other mail client for me. I migrated 80k emails (from about 10 yrs) over to mail.

I do have it giving me multiple copies of the emails though.

And I say the obvious for those who have actually "lost" email. Ya guys are actually backing up, right?
posted by filmgeek at 9:00 AM on August 7, 2005

Nope, I've never had the text of messages mangled by the Mail.app MUA. Mail.app 2.0 does crash a hell of a lot, but it doesn't appear to eat the data, it seems like those are just various Tiger framework bugs from the look of the stack traces.

It's kind of a shame. The previous version of the MUA was fairly reliable.
posted by majick at 9:20 AM on August 7, 2005

Nope, I've never had any loss of mail, either whole mailboxes/messages or partial messages. I've got about 2 Gb of mail (around 50K messages), and no issues at all. I'm using the version of Mail.app that comes with Tiger, if that's any help.

(And sellout, that is a derail -- there's clearly no request for an alternative mail program, just a question of whether people have experienced mail loss. While one hasn't erupted yet, please don't help start religious wars -- next, someone'll say "Well, you could always get rid of your stupid Mac and get a Windows box with Outlook, and you'd be all set!" and we'll have a mess on our hands.)
posted by delfuego at 9:47 AM on August 7, 2005

delfuego: weston said he was shopping for a replacement for Mail.app. I was merely offering a suggestion to help him out.

I don't have an answer for forrest, which is why I did not direct my comment to him and mentioned that my comment might be a bit of a derail.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, AskMe isn't intended solely to assist those who post questions to the front.
posted by sellout at 12:35 PM on August 7, 2005

I haven't lost entire emails yet, just portions of messages I send. It happens intermittently, so there's no real way of testing fixes. People will reply to a damaged email, asking what I was talking about or I will see the missing chunks in their quoted replies.

I've switched my smtp server, so I hope that will solve the problem. I am on dialup (no broadband in this area), but it's fairly solid. Anyway, thanks for eliminating the app as the source.
posted by forrest at 3:17 PM on August 7, 2005

Losing batches of entire messages may have to do with your server synchronization settings.

I suspect so, since it happened during the sync process. And it really could have something to do with a buggy POP server -- it's only happened with this one server.

There is a "rebuild" command for mailboxes under the Mailbox menu. If you seem to be missing messages give that a try.

This contributed to a further loss of mail the first time I gave it a shot....

Ya guys are actually backing up, right?

Not often enough, apparently. But even if I were, my experience has been that the amount of pain necessary to merge old mailboxes from backups into even fresh installations of OS X and Mail would still be justification for looking for another email client.

Don't get me wrong. I love OS X. I probably will never choose to have something else as my primary OS, and I loved Mail.app from OS X's first non-beta through 10.1. But from Jaguar on I started to feel like I was fighting with it the UI to get certain things, and shortly after that is when the data loss happened.

I'm sure it's great for managing a .Mac account or single POP or IMAP setup, but I gave up the battle of trying to keep it handling 4-5 different POP/IMAP accounts and associated archives after the first data loss. There's some things in relationships that are unforgivable, and data loss is one of those things when it comes to an email client.
posted by weston at 5:53 PM on August 7, 2005

I haven't had a single problem with Mail.app, ever.
posted by angry modem at 10:39 PM on August 7, 2005