El Capitan Mail Client several issues.

[itics]

Hi all,

At work we've got a bunch of MacBook Pros. The only reason why we didn't roll out to El Capitan yet is several very annoying issues with the Mail.app. Our server is a Cyrus IMAP, Auth setup is OpenLDAP/Kerberos.

Things we notice:

- Mail.app stuffs ~/Library/Mail/V3 until the user is presented with a dialog box the startup disk is completely full. Whatever the Mail client stores locally does not correspond size wise with what's on the server. Just as an example, the entire mail box of a user might be 3GB while ~/Library/Mail/V3 counts 180GB and still it keeps on stuffing more in.
- When I start Mail.app, I see "connecting ...", then it disappears and comes back "Downloading 145 Messages ...". Quit the mail app, restart it, and it does the same again: "Downloading 145 Messages".
- Checking Mail results in "No new messages", then quit Mail then 10 new mails come in all of a sudden.
- Mails not being sent without a clear notification to the user.

What I've tried so far to fix it:
- Disable IDLE command
- Delete ~/Library/Mail/V3 and let the Mail app resync
- Set check frequency from automatic to 5 minutes
- Disable Download attachments
- Change from Kerberos Auth to passwd auth.
- Leave out GnuPG which some of our users use.
- Install vanilla OSX El Capitan (10.11.5 as I'm writing) without any setup script we use locally nor any other software which might interfere.

But nothing so far seems to help. Also if I look up this problem you get a lot of suggestions like "Clean up my Mac" software stuff which is not what I'm after. I'd like to fix the root cause so I don't have to clean out several macs a week.

Thanks a lot for your suggestions

 

[sibcc]

I've just about given up on Apple's mail. There are just too many problems when required settings differ from what Apple expects. Sadly, Mail is so intertwined with the OS that I may be forced to abandon Apple. That something so fundamental to computing arrives broken and stays broken is a testament to Apple's abject arrogance in their new found Iphone wealth. Apple is fast becoming just another hype-machine brand wholly lacking in paradigm shifting innovation and quality. Over time, design without underlying quality usually dosn't end well for a company.

Coindidentally, this just came in from my RSS feed:
"After 5 Years As Apple CEO, Tim Cook Scores C-"
Forbes Magazine

 

[BrianBaughn]

There's a history out there of issues with Cyrus mail servers and El Capitan.

Did you see the thread at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7267399 ?

 

[itics]

No I didn't see that issue yet, thanks. I've just checked and our issue seems to be similar but not the same. For example, we're with a lot more than 3 users on El Capitan and our mail server shows about 10% CPU usage with about 60 clients connecting to it. Also the disk usage seems to be within very reasonable limits.

So far with 10.11.6, I'm still having trouble with this. I've reinstalled my macbook a few times now, sometimes mail is really problematic, sometimes, it's just fine.

 

[simonsi]

Just change mail client, I use Airmail for Outlook, iCloud and mail.com accounts and its pretty solid.No idea about Cyrus though...

 

[itics]

Hi simonsi,

That's not what we want to do. Changing mail client would bring a lot of other issues. We'd only do that in a very last resort option.

 

[simonsi]

Then you will need to contact Cyrus, those kind of issues (seemingly random cpu etc), sounds like it needs dev and that will need to come from them.