I seriously hope that I’m the only person that’s having this problem, but somehow, I doubt it. The last week in October, the box that had my mailserver sitting on it blew up, and took DNS with it. I don’t live and die by email, but I certainly use it a lot, so this was a big problem. Fortunately, google launched the new IMAP beta for Gmail the same day. So, I headed over to google accounts, singed up, did all the fiddly bits of redirecting DNS, and after about an hour of screwing around with it, I had Google Accounts hosting my mail for a domain that I own, and activated IMAP. I configured Mail.app on all of my machines, and life was good.
Over the following days, I was having connectivity issues, mostly with Mail.app in Leopard. (I still have Tiger on a machine too, and did not have those problems on that install) So when I was having a problem with Mail.app, I just popped on over to the webform, composed my emails there, and sent them off. That’s supposed to be the beauty of IMAP, after all, right? It’ll show up in my Sent Mail folder in Mail.app the next time it’s able to connect, so, not THAT big of a deal.
Turns out, it was a bigger deal than I had realized. Gmail likes to autosave a draft for you at some interval, so that you don’t lose a message. Seems reasonable. You can even work on a draft in the webform, and come back to it later in your desktop client, because, after all, that’s the POINT of IMAP. So, where am I going with all of this? Well, there appears to be a bug somewhere in this process, and I’m not sure where or what it is yet. I discovered today that EVERY time the gmail webform saved a draft of an email, that draft was actually being SENT. What’s worse, is Gmail uses AJAX for sending mail, which tends to leave a user somewhat uninformed of what’s going on on the server side of the job, and wondering if the mail they intended to send actually went through or not. I left it alone for about ten minutes the other night, while it was seemingly hanging, and when I came back, it had done nothing, so I clicked the send button a few times to get the damn thing to go. I wound up sending 19 duplicate emails to a guy that I don’t even know. How humiliating!
So, I don’t know if the problem is always on the Gmail side of this, or with Gmail and Mail.app in Leopard syncing up, but flooding people’s inboxes is bad bad bad. It’s even worse when they’re getting flooded with drafts. I deleted my Gmail account from Mail.app in Leopard, and am going to set it up again, to see if it continues to misbehave. It hadn’t connected for over an hour when I decided to just delete it, and I didn’t want to risk flooding the inboxes of any more unsuspecting strangers. I’ll post more when I know more, but in the meantime, if anyone stumbles across this post and is experiencing similar issues, I’d love to hear about them.
UPDATED! If you’re having this problem, fear not - it’s not really a big deal. Check the follow up to this post for an explanation and a solution.
