I finally figured out how to get Mail.app 2.0 working well in Tiger. It should have been obvious to me, but it took me trying to live with both Thunderbird and Entourage for my mail. If you don’t already know this, let me be the first to tell you: both of those applications SUCK. The really crazy thing about how badly they suck is they’re what most of the world uses for email. Most of the world: How can you STAND it? I would rather use Mutt.
The problem I experienced seems to be related entirely to IMAP. When I first loaded Mail, it imported all my mail archives from Mail.app 1, about 1.5GB worth, without a hitch. Then it started working on synching up with my two main IMAP mailboxes. One of them is small, mostly text and html messages, no more than a couple hundred at a time. The other one, my work email, can get quite large, with up to a thousand messages and lots of large attachments.
My results each time, no matter what gyrations I attempted on the client and server, including starting with a completely fresh Library/Mail directory and an empty IMAP mailbox on the server, always ended up within half an hour with Mail’s activity window showing “[Account ] Synchronizing with server” and “Adding Messages” forever. Yes, I let it run overnight once, just in case. It doesn’t use any network or CPU when in this state. It appears blocked.
The workaround is to use POP on my Tiger machine until Apple manages to fix this bug. I was hopeful that 10.4.1 would do it, but no luck. Radar Problem ID 4105091 remains open and annoying!
For the record, I think it is weak to break such an important application, especially for as long as its been since 10.4.0 came out. I would have reverted to Panther, but I need Java 1.5 for my work and don’t feel like using another computer running Panther just for email.