Oh, Mail.app...our love/hate relationship blossomed so quickly. I was willing to overlook your quirks for so long but some recent interactions pushed the limit beyond my tolerance levels.
I overlooked your occasional decision to just stop receiving mail. Lunchtime would roll around and I realized that I didn't get the announcement that it was ready...I'd check Gmail's web interface and the message was there, sometimes with other messages in the queue as well, but your interface was blank to new messages. I'd close you out and re-launch and the new messages would pour in. But we all have occasional lapses in attention. As long as my phone or Pavlovian response would remind me to check when you were acting up, I guess that's good enough to forgive that occasional lapse.
Then there were the times you didn't let me eject a disk. Well, an SD card, but it's treated as a disk. I'd insert the chip, and then I'd attach an image stored on the card...it was the simplest way to get images from the camera to you...to a coworker so he could retouch it for use in our badge printer. Then I'd try to eject the disk after sending the email and the operating system insisted the disk was in use. Lsof would confirm that you were holding the file open. Why?
You'd never tell me. But if I exited and relaunched you, suddenly the SD card could be ejected. I figured it was just your way of pulling a silly prank on me. Maybe it was your way of protesting frivolous use of fclose(). Or you were trying to train me to copy files to a local directory before using them as attachments. Perhaps fclose() is just hard? I don't know. You just persisted in teasing me, never telling me why.
But some sins just couldn't be forgiven. I mean, the whole "forgetting to get mail" was close...especially when I'm expected to reply to requests for help. I was fortunate enough to have multiple notification systems for that, so,...haha! Joke was on you!
Crashing the operating system was over the line. I'm not sure how it happened, exactly. I suspected it was triggered by something in the formatting of a quote from one of our vendors; I'd view the message, and part of the quote...listing all the options in the system configuration...was missing. Within a minute the operating system belched a warning that all the application memory was exhausted. I couldn't stop it once the spiral started. The interface became unresponsive and soon locked up. Secure shell no longer answered attempts to connect. The operating system just giggled at me in a permanently frozen grin. I had to power cycle the machine. If you relaunched and tried previewing that message again, BAM, memory exhaustion followed with another hard reset. This was a quirk I couldn't work around.
Well, technically I could use Gmail's web interface to clear the message, which is what I did. But if I get another message from that vendor with a quote attached, I knew it would lead to another round of hard restarts and filesystem checks. I was stuck waiting for what amounted to a denial of service attack straight to my inbox.
So it was at this point I had no choice but to say goodbye. It turns out it seems there aren't a lot of free mail clients for OS X. Maybe I didn't look hard enough. But that's okay. I decided to give Thunderbird a try. It's not perfect; it's a cross-platform client, and it shows in the way it handles the interface. It doesn't quite feel like it does things in the "Macintosh Way." But it's decent. So far it doesn't crash on me when viewing attachments. I haven't exhaustively checked everything, but I'm sure I'll discover handling issues over time, if they're there.
And you didn't make it easy to leave you, Mail! I had to search to figure out how to set Thunderbird as my "default" mail client. Turns out I had to launch YOU again and change the setting from your menus! It made no sense to me!
There are times that I miss you. I think of you every time I search for an email. It's impossible! Well, as long as I use Thunderbird's search. It's painful. There's a setting in the preferences to allow Spotlight to index messages; I end up using that instead. It's irritating, having to use a service outside the application to search for something stored in the application. But at least it works.
Well, mostly. Even after making the "default mail client change," opening messages from Spotlight search results would open using you! There's no easy way to find a way to change that. I ended up opening a question on the Apple Stack Exchange site to try fixing it.
And of course Thunderbird acts a little weird about attachments. It has a neat feature where if I type the word "attached"...like, "I attached a photo to edit for Bob's badge!"...Thunderbird will ask me if I want to attach a file. And I can navigate to the folder and attach the file in question. It appears as a "file" list in a pane near the top of my mail composer.
But I can also drag and drop the picture into the composition window. Then the image appears right in the email, much like when I attach files into your messages, Mail!
But...it's not consistent. I sent the same image in both ways, and when I received them, it was like the message was embedding the file in two different ways. How weird and annoying. I also realized that attachments don't show up in the reader. PDF's look like attached icons, and to view them I have to open them. I can't drag and drop them to other applications; with Mail, I can have our online KanBan board opened to a card where I can drop attachments to upload to that system. So I'd get a quote from a vendor, and on the card where I was tracking the purchase, I would just drag the PDF from the email to the KanBan card and it would upload. With Thunderbird I had to save the file to the disk first. Another annoyance.
There are just too many seemingly common file formats that Thunderbird doesn't know how to display inline. An annoyance. About on par with the times you wouldn't let me eject a disk after sending a file. Tolerable, I guess.
Now I'm waiting for a showstopper to appear in Thunderbird. It took awhile before I gave up on you, Mail.app. It took a long time before I hit something that I just couldn't make excuses for anymore. And I'm still sad to say goodbye; you have so much potential! I wanted you to work well. But sometimes...it felt like you just didn't get enough love from your programming team. I saw people complaining about issues similar to my memory exhaustion problem back in October, nearly 6 months ago! Couldn't this have been addressed in a patch by now?
Now I'm getting into the groove of using Thunderbird. Even if you did fix these issues, I don't know if I'll want to come back. Or I won't want to come back without a really good incentive. I suppose it's possible. Maybe someday I'll forget about your irritations and wonder why I ever left you. I'll reinstall the operating system and think it's best to just use the default client rather than go through the trouble of reconfiguring Thunderbird all over again...there sure a lot of settings to tweak, after all. Maybe at that point I'll sigh and dread making sure all my settings are properly set and decide it's best to just return to you, after writing this post becomes a distant memory.
Or the Thunderbird team will have a simple way to export settings.
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