The innacurately named Mail 2.0

I’ve been attempting to use the latest version of Apple Mail to read my mail. An uncontroversial thing to do, you might think, but I can’t actually manage it.

I started Mail about an hour ago, and it has busied itself ever since with tasks more important than letting me read my mail. According to Mail’s “Activity Viewer” window, or the “Reasons Why I Can’t Read My Mail” window as I’ve come to think of it, Mail has been preoccupied updating colours (updating colours!?), synchronising with servers, adding messages, and otherwise keeping the fan on the PowerBook running noisily.

If I click on a message folder, Mail goes from telling me that the folder contains, say, 40 unread messages, to either displaying a spinning “you can’t do anything right now” icon next to the folder name, or deciding that the folder is, in fact, empty.

This is baffling. The previous ignominious head of my graphical mail client shit list was Mozilla Thunderbird, with Ximian/Novell Evolution close on its heels, but I think that we may have a clear winner here.

I am becoming tempted to return to reading my mail under with Gnus or VM under Emacs.

Update: Two hours, and Mail is still not done gazing at its navel! It is to weep.

Posted in software

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