Last week, I and I guess most Mac users who had turned on Software update warnings, were invited in large friendly letters to upgrade to the new system, MacOS 10.9 or Mavericks, for free! A novelty, as we remember, it was from System 7.1 in 1992 that Apple started to charge for system upgrades, so after twenty years a more friendly approach is back.
However, before I got round to accept the offer (you must set aside download time and re-organizing time etc. for a couple of hours), I received a warning from TidBits that it might be adviseable to hold off - there were significant problems with in particular how Mail works in Mavericks one should be aware of, before taking the jump.
<http://tidbits.com/article/14219>
It seemed however to affect particular cases, especially those who uses Mail mainly for gmail (Google Mail) and had followed Tidbits' Joe Kissel's earlier suggestions for gmail, which now are broken. I never did that, and gmail is only a secondary address for me, so I thought I should on the one hand be careful, on the other test things out to see how it worked. As it happens, I have a travel Mac, a MacBook Air (on which I write this), with a full Mail setup, but which I do not use daily. I decided therefore to install Mavericks there first, to see what happend.
The install itself is smooth, as you could expect - click, and go away and read a book or magazine for the hour or so the process takes (check in at beginning and end for giving various permission, but in the middle just let it work). I forgot the very useful advice to first download the installer, then quit and copy that installer app on a USB, before installing, that would have saved me the time to download it again for when my other Macs are to be upgraded (the installer deletes itself when Mavericks has been installed). Would have saved me 15 minutes or so, but never mind.
On restart, you have to give various passwords, AppleID and the Mac's admin ID and so on, as usual. I think I made a mistake, because I use different IDs for iCloud and iTunes, and probably gave the wrong one at one point, because I got a blank square covering some window and which I could not click away. But once I saw what was below (System Preferences), I could quit that and reopen, and then (in the menu) of the new iBook app log out of my iCloud account and into the iTunes one, where I have my books. Worked.
Mail issues
However, the main quest was for Mail problems. And yes, there were problems, and yes, they are sufficiently important that I am holding off a bit to see if Apple will fix them with a "10.9.1" bug fix before I install Mavericks on my main machines. If Apple does not, however, it may be possible to work around the issues.
First, a simple one. Each time I openend Mail (which was a lot, in the testing), it kept bugging me for my iCloud password for getting @me.com mail (like everyone, I have such a passive account). It would not remember the password I put into Mail's Accounts pane. The answer was quick, and cited in the TidBits article above: Open System Preferences, the iCloud pane, and then first uncheck the Mail item, and then immediately check it again - that forces Mail to re-configure itself, and you will see that the password item has disappeared from Mail's own iCloud account setting - it now takes it from the general settings, and remembers it.
But then the major one. Joe Kissel's problem was, as mentioned, related to gmail, and had something to do with gmail's special "All Mail" mailbox. I had never messed with that, and could see no problems of the type he mentioned. Probably this, the major point of his article, only or mostly concern those who use Mail mainly for gmail.
However, the second point he briefly mentions, and which has been widely reported on the web, was a major stumbling block for me: Smart mailboxes, which were and still are mainly broken in Mavericks Mail. Smart mailboxes have got several new features, and are possibly built up differently from before, I don't know. However, to explain, this is how I read mail, and why smart boxes are important for my workflow:
I use Mail as a main mail archive, set up with dozens and dozens of mailboxes: for persons, for topics, for mailing lists, for countries or whatever. Anything that I can identity (mainly from regular senders) gets automatically filtered to its mailbox immediately on arrival, whether it is my students, from the department, or newsletters or mailing lists - everything disappears from the In box before I see it, but is of course still listed as "unread" until I read it. The In box only includes mail from irregular correspondents, or those colleagues I want to read first - I always first read through the Inbox, dump spam and answer requests. Then, I have set up a smart mailbox that collects all unread mail that is (a) not in the Inbox (b) not in the high-volume mailing lists, which I read at the end when I have time. But this "Unread" smart mailbox is thus essential, it includes lots of important mail from regular senders.
What happened in Mavericks, is that the Unread list gave a surprisingly high number of items on its badge: about 200, while it should actually be 10-15 since my last mail check. But when I opened the box, it was empty. The menu line said: "0 messages. 196 unread". Now, I could see down in the list of "real" mailboxes that there were a number of unreads down there, but the smart box did not list them. I restarted a few times and tried a few others things, like creating new smart mailboxes afresh, but with basically the same result, all apparently empty. I saw on the net many people who had tried various strange suggestions to no avail, so it was and is a real bug.
Finally, I found a solution that was supposed to work (in the same TidBits article; always check in Tidbits): "Kirk McElhearn found all his smart mailboxes empty, and was able to correct the problem by quitting Mail, deleting the three files beginning with “Envelope Index” in
~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData, reopening Mail, and letting it reindex his messages." I did this,(*) and lo and behold, something happened: Mail put up "Welcome to Mail! For this new version, we need to process your mail to the present version of Mail" [or words to that effect, from my memory]. This is well and good, it is supposed to do this, but it never did when I first started Mail in Mavericks. So here was a possible bug, Mail had skipped its own upgrade process. Anyway, it went to work on my 100.000+ messages, and spent the next fifteen minutes on that. And did it work?Yes! Or at first appearances anyway. The message count in Unread was down to about 25-30, a bit too many (it included a number of old messages from gmail's Unwanted mailbox), but they were all present and viewable in the mailbox. So, I could just walk through them as ususal and see the badge count drop by one for each. Down to the last. But that one did not go away. I dumped it manually, and it did go away from the mailbox, but the counter remained at 1. The same for the new boxes I had created just before, the all were stuck with one, invisible, unread mail. Now, I found a way to get rid of that minor issue: I went to Edit smart mailbox, took away the rule "Message Is Unread", and then added it again, and then the invisible 1 disappeared. Everything OK. Until the next actually new unread message came in - but not in the Unread box. This time, neither badge nor content shifted, the smart box had simply stopped working. Only the second (old trial) box, where I had not edited the rules, worked (with the invisible 1 in place), all others were broken again. But that one worked - or did it? It included several unread messages that were in the Inbox - which should be excluded. So, it seems to have found all unread messages, i.e. just the first line on the smart box definition, not the ones following.
Last ditch effort: To recreate a smart box afresh, now completely under a properly updated Mail. That kind of works: The invisible 1 was back, but otherwise it seemed to pick up actually unread messages in the mailboxes it should (although some have got strange names, like "Archive" and "Important", apparently from gmail which Mail formerly ignored) and only those. This morning, after one night, the invisible 1 even went away again, but now in the afternoon, it lists 3 after I have read everything. So the badge count is off, apparently haphazardly so, but I can live with that, I guess. I will keep watching for a while, and see what happens.
But the moral appears to be: Make sure Mail actually shows a Welcome to you message and spends time updating your mailboxes (you will notice, a lengthy process), and then re-create any smart mailbox you have had in the old version. For the monent, this seems to work, but there may be other bugs that could raise their heads (but I am very happy that Cmd-Option-T for "Move to [last used Mailbox] again" once again works, saves me a lot of menu trips).
(*) How to open your Library folder? Improvement: It is still hidden by default, but now you can set this to display in an option in Finder's: View: Show View Options menu.
