Phantom emails and the loss of a little trust.
Email. It’s still the number one app that I use day in and day out. Instant messenger systems are fine and I’m sure that I would use them provided that my everyone used them. It seems that the people I most want to speak with are never on instant messenger systems: they’re the people too busy to be crowd their life with another stream of information grabbing attention. Wait, I too am one of those people.
So I don’t use instant messenger often. However email is the critical app for me. So an email client has to be super stable. I have hundreds of thousands of emails. Chances are I could delete 95% of these emails and life would go on. However I can’t figure out which 5% I should keep and so I keep everything.
That’s been fine: I have a system that’s been working great for me. I can find any email going back years in a matter of seconds and there’s no tedious filing processes to worry about. It’s not automated—although I’m sure it could be—but it relies on a simple passive set of commands and there’s no brainwork involved in anything other than responding.
I love my system.
I upgraded to Lion. Let me say, that I’m with Neven Mrgan — Lion Mail’s Archive function is exactly what I’ve been looking for for years. I used to have a folder called Filed that everything went to. Now that folder is called Archive and I use the default button, and more often, the Apple-Shift-A shortcut to file all email once it’s been responded to.
My goal is to get to zero emails in my inbox every night. However Lion’s Mail application seems to have introduced some corruption into the database. Now a number of email inboxes show unread messages. The problem’s the worst with an Exchange account but non-Exchange accounts also show errors. It’s not a serious problem but it is bothersome: every day I keep thinking about how to remove those last remaining eleven mails from my inbox even though there is no mail in my inbox. I don’t have time during my day to truck the laptop over to a Genius bar (or whatever they may be called in third party stores, since there seems to be no genuine Apple store in Berlin) and certainly the problem isn’t significant enough to warrant taking that time off. So, what is going on?
Well, a couple of threads on Apple’s support discussion board point to some corruption of the Mail database when upgrading operating systems. It seems I’m not the only one with phantom email counts. The fix (if you can call it a fix) seems to be a pretty blunt force method: move the folder, start Mail and rebuild everything from scratch.
I have hundreds of thousands of emails in multiple accounts.
So, I have started the process: I have over an hour to go before Mail finishes importing my mail again. I’m hoping and praying that this situation gets resolved at this point.
I can only imagine that Apple’s testing team were not as thorough as they should have been when it came time to ship Lion and they cut corners on Mail testing and upgrading scenarios. Or, if I’m more generous: they honestly didn’t see this scenario come up in their testing environment. I cannot imagine why: the online Exchange account, the one with the most issues is only 250Mb in total and contains email only from the last month. Everything else is taken offline and stored locally. I’m sure most users keep more email in their systems on a day-to-day basis than this.
This is disturbing to me: as I mentioned before mail is my bread and butter. Corruption happens all the time. Indexes get messed up all the time. If my default mail client can’t recognize corruption that it introduced and fix it during an upgrade then I begin to worry. It’s a little crack in the veneer of “it just works,” but it is a crack that I don’t need. And it is a little crack in the trust that I blindly give Apple as I upgrade to the latest system.
This may be naïve but if I’m naïve then I argue so are a huge percentage of users who upgrade to the latest Apple operating system update as soon as it is available. I trust this is the last time we’ll see sloppy QA on mission-critical app supplied as part of Apple’s OS. I trust, but my trust is a little more shy today than it was yesterday.
