full fathom five

I’ve been a long term user of Thunderbird (on both the PC & Mac) and its sluggish UI, lack of integration with OSX’s addressbook and its pitiful spam detection had been slowly wearing me down. Don’t get me wrong, it’s actually done its main task - receiving and sending email - with aplomb. I just expect more from my application experiences now I’m a OSX neophyte.

Late Sunday afternoon, with a migration tool on hand with a decent rap on macosxhints.com, I reasoned I had exactly enough time to try out a migration to Mail.app before this evening’s Dr Who re-run stole my attention for the night’s remains.

The migration seemed to go fine - the number of emails in various folders seemed to tally correctly and a spot check of a dozen emails with attachments yielded the right blob of bits. Then it all went wrong. Subsequent clicking on emails that initially seemed fine before now delivered a cryptic message telling me the body had not been downloaded from the server. Cryptic, indeed, as the message was lying on the Mac’s file system and I had yet to configure any POP accounts.

Several unsuccessful re-imports later and I asked the Google Gods the meaning of Mail.app’s messy entrails. The revelation came to me in the form of a humorous technical note by Apple: Mail.app doesn’t work properly when you have more than 2gb of email. The workaround seemed to be: clean up your mail boxes to a “reasonable” size. I may expect more of my application experiences nowdays but that still includes the expectation they don’t impose unrealistic limits on the amount of data they will handle (or at least warn me when they’re exceeded).

With my trial complete, I decided changing the emailing habits of a decade were beyond the scope and time available (or is that time and space?) before me on a lazy Sunday afternoon while waiting for the Tardis’ familiar hum.