🙂
I have encountered zero problems with Mail on Lion and believe eventual problems mentioned here lie in mail servers garden, not properly implementing industry standards:
- my Mail DB has 200'000 messages, 107 GB over last 8 years
- I have sent no less than 11'000 messages via Mail, 3'200 on Lion
- I have 16 account on 8 different domains
- one of the accounts is IMAP (on me.com), the other 15 accounts are POP. I kept gmail account as IMAP for some months last year without any problems
- 99% of my 1000+ recipients are using Windows mail clients
- for most of accounts I use gmail as SMTP server, me.com for me.com account and local provider in some cases
- Mail keeps running 24 hour a day and reads all accounts once a minute
- same mail accounts are read occasionally, once a day, on my iPhone, me.com via push
- Mail 5.2 on Mac OSX 10.7.3 and MBP early 2009
- mail accounts preferences are stable for many months
- I change passwords once a couple of months and change authentication settings if an account SMTP/POP server settings are changed
Once a week or so I am getting an error message on Mail asking to supply a password during mail read. Most often when a message comes from one account, it comes from EACH account on the same domain:
- I cancel that message and do nothing (do not supply any passwords, Mail never forgets my password)
- after some time, 5 min. or hour, I just reset the account status, if needed, and try again to read the account
- after sometime, the account is read normally, without changing anything on Mail side
What is happening is not a problem of Mail itself, but a problem at IMAP/POP server side or in communication with that server. Such problem could happen with any IMAP/POP server, including gmail and me.com and is self-cured within some time, minutes or hours, in typical case.
Similar problem arise during mail send, but vary rarely. Again, I do not need to do anything, just tray again later and wait until SMTP server begins to work normally.
What I would suggest to Apple designers is to make error messages less cryptic and more descriptive on password request. In any case Mail or Keychain do not forget any passwords :-)
Having a JPG or single page PDF shown as embedded is a feature I like. Once a three months someone complains (I send daily attached JPG/PDF files) that these are embedded and not attached, but I believe it is a matter of recipient mail client (quality).
My only complain is that Mail begins to work very slow in low memory environment, but it is a general complain about Mac OSX.
Memory management of Mac OSX is not optimal for me (too quick too much inactive and not free memory) even with 8 GB RAM. After couple of hours intensive use of Safari (typically 10+ tabs open), Mail, Preview (5-10 PDFs), Numbers (5-7 spreadsheets), FileMaker, Skype and Trillian free memory is approaching zero and FreeMemory Pro comes in action if I do not want to reboot 🙂