Mail in Leopard is a disaster

What’s up with Mail? I’m thinking of upgrading this week, and as a big user of Mail, i’m keen to hear more about your experience.

I’m just going to ignore this rant, since it doesn’t do anything to illuminate the problems. It’s worth taking 30 seconds to step back and breathe before exploding all over your blog like that.
Leopard arrives today for me, and I’m looking forward to Mail’s new features. If you can give me any reasons why I should be cautious then I’m all ears, but this post is really unhelpful.

Ouch. I don’t use Mail, but I guess I’ll be waiting a few months to upgrade (as usual)… lol, gives me time to save up to actually buy it, anyway. :P

@roger: It’s Adam’s blog, I think he should feel free to explode all over it when he likes!

@adam: Notes and to-dos are kind of weird (and ugly), unnecessary clogging up of the Mail interface, but I haven’t found any specific bugs/hangs/crashes yet… I’m only using Leopard on my travel laptop thus far though. I’m interested to hear more about your problems before I go to the effort of upgrading my main beast.

I feel your pain. Just finished Apple Support UK call number four with little of no help. Mail STILL keeps asking for my POP password whenever it tries to download from the server. Have recreated a new user, reinstalled, deleted keychains etc etc etc

Grrrr!

Yup! I found your site by googling “Leopard Mail fucking hate” after destroying an afternoon trying to get it to work.

The Mail team are dumber than Adirondack deer. I don’t want new features, I want a simple program that works right.

Well, one needs to think like Steve Jobs walking a “Demo” tightrope (e.g. I saw him introduce the Next Machine in Boston’s Symphony Hall, back in the day) to get Mail set up in Leopard. Cardinal rule: Don’t do anything behind Mail’s back, as many of us have learned to do over the years, in response to limitations. Figure out how to do everything through Mail’s interface. After any corruption, start totally from scratch, and reimport one’s old mailboxes. One knows that Mail passed various tests before release; stick to behaviors they’re likely to have completely tested.

That said, Mail is now MUCH faster and more stable in actual use. I could sort a dozen years of messages by year/month quickly, free from the old crashes that would leave duplicate messages everywhere. Smart mailboxes now open faster.

I was looking to third party software to search my old messages, which were too many for Mail. Now, Mail is up to the task.

Yes, Mail is a problem. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. Apple Support acknowledges this, if you get the right tech. They need to fix it. I have an alternate machine with Tiger on it. It consistently functions, when leopard mail will not. This qualifies as ‘buggy’ in my experience. I can do without the bells and whistles, if I can reliably send and receive mail.

The worst part is that, if you upgrade to a new machine, you’re stuck. You MUST use leopard. It’s just not ready for prime time, yet.