Low-Hanging Fruit

Brent Simmons:

I got email from my Dad where he describes a bug in Mail on El Capitan and how he solved it by going back to Yosemite.

I was never able to get Mail to work. In the end, it was a resource hog. Somehow between Yosemite on September 28 and yesterday, my available storage space went from 71GB to 3GB (on a 320GB hard drive). For the last week and a half, I could not even open mail with El Capitan. Even in “safe” mode, I could not get Mail to work.

…So, I am living with Yosemite, and it works fine.

Last night I edited the Safari bookmarks on my development machine. The changes didn’t sync to my laptop.

I gave it overnight — they still haven’t synced. I tried turning Safari syncing on and off, on both machines, and that didn’t help. I ended up making the changes manually on my laptop to match my development machine.

I waited until last week to upgrade my iMac to El Capitan. (I’m usually pretty reckless about upgrading my MacBook to new OS versions, including betas. I’m usually pretty conservative about upgrading my desktop.) This is a relatively new iMac with 5K Retina Display — when I bought it last year, it started with a clean installation of Yosemite. I didn’t use Migration Assistant to move over anything from an older Mac.

When the upgrade to El Capitan finished on my iMac, three of my email accounts in Mail were missing. They happened to be the accounts for my three most important email addresses. Two of them were still configured in Mail’s settings, but had been disabled — I just needed to toggle the “Enable this account” checkbox for each of them. The third account I had to reconfigure from scratch. All three accounts needed to re-download all of my mail — about 280,000 messages all told. These are IMAP accounts, so the mail was (and remains) on the server. I sure hope this bug doesn’t affect POP accounts (where the mail is only stored locally). This sort of bug would be terrifying for normal people, who don’t understand how IMAP works. If this happened to my parents, I’m certain they would just assume their email was gone, forever.

Also: Here’s a screenshot of my text replacements shortcuts (System Prefs: Keyboard: Text) after the upgrade to El Capitan. This I “fixed” by restarting the Mac.

Brent:

What I’m hoping for — what I’m nearly begging for, more as a user than as developer — is that Apple spend a year making things better. Nothing new. Just make things work better.

★ Monday, 7 December 2015