Annoying Mail Bug
posted on march 19, 2004, tag: software
Update: This bug is fixed as of May 26, 2004, with the release of OS X version 10.3.4.
I reported this Mail bug to apple about five days after installing Panther. It's subsequently been marked as a duplicate and seemingly on track to get fixed, but in the mean time it's been 5 months and this bug drives me crazy on a daily basis. Since the last bug I reported with an Apple product managed to get some attention, I figured I might as well post about this one too—maybe it will help it get fixed faster.
It's really a little thing. The bug is as follows: Mail creates a blank menu item in the drawer contextual menu each time a new viewer window is created. Let me demonstrate:
That's what the Mail contextual menu looks like normally. This is what it looks like the first time you control- or right-click in the drawer after Mail has launched. Great. Now let's say you close the window (not the app) or create a new viewer window (Option+Command+N) and then you bring up the contextual menu again:
Oh, great—Mail has added an empty item to the top of the menu. It doesn't do anything, but it's there. Not such a big deal, though, since it's only moved the real items down a notch.
Well, that's the problem. It's not only going to happen once. I leave Mail open 24 hours a day. When I get new mail, I click on Mail and read it, then I close the window and leave the app running the background. I would assume everyone else in the free world does this as well.
That means that every time we check our mail, close the window, and open it again later, we're creating another blank item. Eventually, using the contextual menu is very difficult. Here's what it looks like after eight or so of these events:
Now to use the menu you have to control- or right-click and then find the menu items at the bottom. This isn't even the worst—a few times I've had so many blanks that the menu became truncated and I had to scroll past the blanks just to get to the read items.
Understandably, this contextual menu is not used very frequently. It contains items that most people wouldn't use on a day-to-day basis. But that makes it all the more frustrating because when you actually do have to use it, it's usually already full of blank items and has rendered itself a pain in the ass.
I was hoping this would be fixed in 10.3.2, but it wasn't. When I saw Mail was affected by the changes in 10.3.3, I thought that would certainly include fixing this bug. But it didn't. Will I have to wait until 10.4 or Mail 3.0 to see a fix?
Comments
There are 14 comments, comments are closed
Michael McCracken on 03/19/2004:
THIS is similar to a (harder to reproduce) bug I've noticed after using Mail for several days without quitting: eventually the status line above the messages table gets stuck on "Opening mailbox" and, seemingly at the same time the Search Field menu's menu item that says what mailbox you're searching is permanently replaced by "<Do not localize>". Ugh.
But maybe a workaround for your Mail problem: Why not just hide the app instead of closing the window?
Mail is the Windows of my Mac experience: I'm now in the habit of restarting it daily.
Mathew Hoy on 03/19/2004:
g,
i get another error that changes all the addresses in mail messages to "xkyxkx;lkm;klkljmmxjjx" rather than the actual names. when i close mail and reopen it, the names/addresses are restored.
i'm referring to the preview pane of the mail app. seems to happen when i wake the computer up from sleep after a day of rest?
-m
Ronan on 03/20/2004:
I also have noticed that particular Mail app bug and I'd agree it does get quite annoying. If you are interested here are a few other bugs I've noticed in OS X:
- Navigate to a web page with a <textarea /> in Safari. Write enough in the <textarea /> to cause the scroll bars to appear. Leave the cursor at the end of the <textarea /> and change tab. Change back and the <textarea /> has scrolled back up to the top. (This can be extremely annoying when you are writing weblog entries from within a browser and you must keep changing tab to collect URLs or quotes for example).
- In Mail app, create a mail folder and with in that 5 more folders; name them randomly one through to five. Now try and drag them around to put them in order. It is either very hard (you must move all the folders out of the parent folder then add them back in a semi-random order and they seem to go in one-five), or impossible (dragging them tends to either put them as child folders or completely drag them out of the parent folder).
- Open up round 10 applications. On the menu bar at the top click "Hide $program" individually on each program. When you get to the last program the first one you 'hid' becomes visible again and upon hiding again the second program you hid becomes visible. This continues indefinitely.
I'm sure there are a few others I've come across but I can't think of them at the moment. Anywho, we shouldn't complain, the bugs give OS X character ;)
Josh Jarmin on 03/20/2004:
I have been noticing this bug as well, but i never really stopped to figure out why it was happening. I have had it get so bad that i had the scroll thingy go from the top of my screen to the bottom with nothing but blanks. I think we all just need to go write apple over and over till they fix it. Great post by the way.
Richard Hadfield on 03/20/2004:
"I would assume everyone else in the free world does this as well."
Well not me.....[and I'm in the free world; not America]. I either delete my read mail immediately or, if I wish to keep it, transfer it from the 'in' folder to another folder to save. And Mail is in use all day, all night, all week.
Cheers Richard
Jon on 03/20/2004:
Try hiding Mail (Command-H) instead of closing the window all the time. I think this is how the rest of the free world does it.
Richard Newman on 03/20/2004:
You're absolutely right! I'd never used the context menus for a mailbox, so I'd never noticed this.
Context menus and dropdowns in general seem screwed up quite often I find that I open a menu and it's empty, and I have to scroll down to see the elements! That's odd indeed. This has happened since 10.2.something.
Ronan: regarding point 2 - you're not supposed to be able to put Mail folders out of alphabetical order, as far as I can see. So dragging will either move it out of the parent, or make it a child of a sibling. Holding Opt makes a copy, but nothing else has an effect. I don't know of any way to turn off sorting.
Kevin on 03/21/2004:
"I leave Mail open 24 hours a day. When I get new mail, I click on Mail and read it, then I close the window and leave the app running the background. I would assume everyone else in the free world does this as well."
Umm, command-H? Why in the world would you close the window? That's entirely unnecesary. Why would you ever close any window of a running non-document app? I keep 20 apps running all the time on my old 500 MHz Titanium—there's absolutely no reason to close a window. I typically see uptimes of 2-3 months before an update forces a restart, and I never quit my core 20 apps.
Jack on 03/21/2004:
"Umm, command-H? Why in the world would you close the window? That’s entirely unnecesary. Why would you ever close any window of a running non-document app?"
Umm, why in the world shouldn't he be able to work like that? I close windows in Safari, Address Book, Terminal, iTunes, iChat, iCal, Mail and a bunch of others all the time and leave them up in the background. I close the windows because they are either in the way or that's what I do. BFD. I rarely use hide and I too keep at least 10 apps open al the time. If anything using hide is entirely unnecesary. People work in different ways, free world or not.
Garrett on 03/22/2004:
I have to say that I disagree with you (Kevin and Jon) on the hiding method. I think of hiding as a temporary way to deal with multiple applications being open, not a permanent one.
There's a reason you can close the main application window in Mail and the app stays open. There's also a reason System Preferences quits when you close its window—some applications are designed to be running the background, windowless, at all times. But that doesn't mean hidden.
Don't get me wrong—I do use Hide quite a lot. But not for long-term management. And even so, even if I did use hide, this is still an annoying bug.
Ronan on 05/27/2004:
Garrett, with 10.3.4 the Mail bug is fixed. Run Software Update if you haven't yet.
Garrett on 05/27/2004:
Fixed indeed! Finally!
Mel David on 09/08/2004:
Hi all, I've just noticed the exact same bug described in this page. But I am on Mac OS X 10.3.5. Did it just happen to resurface again aftyer being fixed in 10.3.4?
Mel David on 09/08/2004:
Um, never mind. I just ran the Mac OSX Combo 10.3.5 update again and it solved the bug. I think maybe perhaps a third party extension/plugin introduced the bug again.