Mail Mac oddity

[Dave2002]

Last night I turned on my MBP and tried to access Mail, and the machine seemed to want to reinstall Mail (for Sierra) and import all the mail again - as if it was a new installation.

I might lose some old email as a result, though as I've got other machines if I really need to check old mail I can probably still do that.
I am wondering if something has changed with Mail, or if there are other gremlins now getting into my machine. In other words, is this something fairly benign, is it a glitch specific to my machine, or is it a sign of more problems?

I think perhaps an index file was corrupted.

[french frank]

More likely to be your set-up on that, I think. I've regularly upgraded (now on High Sierra for iMac and MacBook) and never had a problem. The only occasional difficulty has been trying to alter account information/passwords when I get the spinning cog and the message 'Unable to verify username and password'. It then has to be gently coaxed into complying with my instructions.

[Dave2002]

ff thanks . It is looking at present like a specific issue on this machine. Search through mail is also not working properly as yet - maybe it needs to index everything again - quite a pain. I may have to go to the other machines to get some things done.

[ardcarp]

Mail Mac oddity

Something to do with Burns Night?

[MrGongGong]

I've had it do that before
I now use Thunderbird as well which seems to overcome most of the issues with Apples crap software

[Dave2002]

I used to use Thunderbird, but that was quite a while back. On the whole I don't find the Apple software too bad. It's not perfect, but better than most of the possible alternatives. I will of course revise my opinion if the problems with mail happen more often.

[Anastasius]

..... On the whole I don't find the Apple software too bad. ....

Safari has become the watchword in bloatware. It takes forever to load and then fails on so many websites these days. So many as to be useless (v 9.1.5)

[Bergonzi]

I think Apple Mail is a rubbish program and I do not use it anymore.

[french frank]

I think Apple Mail is a rubbish program and I do not use it anymore.

I thought I'd give Thunderbird a try as I prefer Firefox to Safari, but I uninstalled it and switched back to Mail quite quickly. Never had a problem with Mail.

[Dave2002]

I thought I'd give Thunderbird a try as I prefer Firefox to Safari, but I uninstalled it and switched back to Mail quite quickly. Never had a problem with Mail.

It's years since I tried Thunderbird. I don't normally find Apple Mail too much of a problem - but the emphasis there is on "normally". Like you I generally prefer Firefox, though some recent feature changes may cause problems to some. The change which shows a splash page with very visible links of interest seems at first sight to be helpful and useful, but could present privacy threats if displayed in public places - for example to show others what bank one uses, or the types of news items one reads. I guess it can be turned off, but as I've not used it much ouside my home I've not bothered or figured out how to do that. I'm not sure whether Safari or Firefox is "better" regarding web pages which use Flash - most decent web pages should use HTML 5 now anyway, and surely both HTML 5 and Flash can be turned on or off in either browser.

[Anastasius]

I thought I'd give Thunderbird a try as I prefer Firefox to Safari, but I uninstalled it and switched back to Mail quite quickly. Never had a problem with Mail.

Nor me. Does what it says on the tin.

I've also switched to Firefox but have a sneaking feeling that it's leaking memory. Also some sites are incredibly slow- such as Google Maps - but run fine on, say, Safari. But then Safari (9.1.5) falls over on so many sites now