Malcolm Owen
Users are reporting issues with the loss of data in Apple's Mail app following the update to macOS 10.15 Catalina, an issue that could lead to the data being made unavailable on other clients that access the same mailboxes.
The recent release of macOS Catalinaversion10.15 on Monday has, as with any major operating system update, been followed by reports from users of issues with some aspects of the software. In the case of macOS Catalina, arguably the biggest issues revolve around the Mail app.
In a blog post by SpamSieve plug-in developer Michael Tsai, Mail is seen to be causing problems when users upgrade, with the data store's update seemingly succeeding, but missing messages or holding incomplete versions.
In some cases, moving messages between mailboxes can result in a blank message containing just header data. If the message was moved to a server mailbox, other devices that access that mailbox may see the message as deleted. Furthermore, when this change synchronizes back to the initial Mac that triggers the chain of updates, the message disappears completely.
Tsai warns users to hold off from updating to Catalina for now if they rely on Mail. For those who upgraded, they may not notice there is a problem unless they look at the mailbox or affected messages, while the synchronization of data with a server can propagate the issue to other Mac or iOS devices.
Backing up data from Mail is also difficult, Tsai advises, as despite setting the preference to do so, Mail "no longer automatically fully downloads all messages," meaning a local data backup may be incomplete. The constantly changing nature of Mail data also makes restoring a backup difficult, due to the need to merge restored messages with new ones, along with live server data.
The issue is exacerbated by Apple advisors allegedly telling users Mail data lost in Catalina cannot be recovered using a backup from Mojave. According to Tsai, Time Machine can be used as normal to access previous versions of folders in Mail's data store, then using the Import Mailboxes command to selectively import them as new local mailboxes that won't affect messages on the server.
Apple will likely be issuing a fix for Mail in a future update, possibly in an early patch that typically arrives to correct bugs shortly after an OS release.
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53 Comments
Is this an issue with IMAP, POP, or both? Or is this ONLY local storage? Apple has historically had problems dealing with mail servers, but I’m not sure I understand what this article is saying.
How do regressions like this keep happening so often? Why are the things that already work continuing to be broken in new versions? One of the Mac OS X updates broke scrolling images in image quicklook (spacebar) when the pointer is not on the part of the quicklook window that has image (blank regions used to scroll correctly), and having the quicklook open while jumping around from image to image in Finder will also break zoom gesture function.
Have Apple fixed the horrible text edit view issues in Safari that they introduced in iOS 7??? iOS 13 fixes which long-standing bugs?
”You don’t understand”, “software development is complicated”, “everything has bugs”, blah blah blah, I know all the geek tech excuses. Instead of being accountable and taking the proper time to do the last 10% of the development (which is 90% of the work), it’s easier to just do social engineering to convince people that constant bugs and error states are “normal” and treat users as ignorant when they demand accountability.
Additionally, and this has been reported to Apple, no longer does a group drag-and-drop into any of Mail’s address lines.
I've personally experienced this. A three message email thread showed the original incoming message in Catalina Mail, but the two incoming responses had headers but no content. The two "blank" messages were fully readable when viewed on my iPad Pro, but disappeared almost immediately as sync'ing occurred. The original message still remains on all devices. So yeah, unless this is Apple's unannounced "burn before reading" security feature, there's definitely a bug.
FWIW these were in my work Exchange email account.
Thanks for the warning.
This may be related. At the same time I updated to iOS 13, I lost all my smart mailboxes on Mojave.