Ten endless hours. That’s how long it took to get my MacMail account back up and running. That marathon was punctuated by two trips to the Apple store, neither of which was especially satisfactory. As beautiful and kewl as the Macintosh’s hardware is, in the software department sometimes the MacEmperor has no clothes.
Damn. Timing couldn’t have been worse. I’d planned to spend an entire day working on a client’s project. After a godawful techno-day, along about 10 p.m. we got an email bitching about our slow performance, for which there are several reasons. One of them is that the client thinks I’m going to write a book in seven weeks, an entirely unreasonable expectation. The other is…episodes like yesterday’s.
Ever since Apple migrated my MacMail over to iCloud, which is required when you upgrade your operating system to Lion, I’ve been getting pop-ups that demand that I re-enter my password. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and… Until I force-quit the program in both computers. That usually makes it stop. For a while.
Speaking of for a while, this has been a known issue for quite some time, but it seems to be worse with iCloud, one of the most useless inventions yet to cloud the technohorizon. When I went in to complain about it several weeks ago, I was told it was a server problem, nothing to do with my machines. Ohhhkkaaayyyyy…. How’s about we fix our servers?
Yesterday, the minute I sat down to open said client’s mountain of e-mails, up popped one of these messages. NOTHING that I did would make it stop. Infuriated after half an hour of dorking with this, I tossed the MacBook in the car and drove down to the Apple store. Of course, by the time I got there, the phenomenon had stopped. However, 14 files, most of them graphics, were sitting on the server, and if the damn thing started up again—which I figured it would as soon as I opened either computer at home—I would never be able to get at them.
Plus really. This had been going on altogether too long. I already have a .com e-mail address for my business through Bluehost. Now that MacMail has proven itself to be utterly unreliable, I asked myself, why on earth aren’t I using the Bluehost account? And more to the point, how am I going to get at this stuff if I the system chokes again?
From the Apple store, I e-mailed all 14 client files to Tina for safekeeping, figuring she could send them back to me if they again became inaccessible on the Mac. Since 13 of them were graphics that not only had to be numbered and stored coherently but also entered in a directory of cutlines and credits, downloading to disk seemed infeasibly time-consuming while I was standing at a counter in the Apple store.
Back at my house, I checked out the Bluehost account, decided it’s not great but it will do, and started the work of transferring my business and personal e-mail from mac.com/me.com to mybusiness.com. Once this was set up, I sent out a blanket e-mail to all my clients telling them what the new address was. I also created an auto-respond message sharing the new address with people who send e-mails to the mac.com address.
{goddamnit! As I write this, MacMail is bouncing at me AGAIN to demand that I fill in a password.}
To set up an auto-respond, you have to use the same function that allows you to make MacMail move certain classes of messages into the trash or into other folders, as desired. This is, on the surface at least, radically different from the auto-respond function in Outlook.
Backstory:
The community colleges and the community college district blitz employees, 24-7, with a constant hailstorm of irrelevant messages. Somehow I got on Phoenix College’s mailing list; I’m on Paradise Valley’s because I contract for that campus, and everyone is on the central district mailing list. Every day something upwards of 100 messages come in, telling me what is being served at the Phoenix College chow line today, not to forget to turn in my PeopleSoft time sheet (contract adjuncts do not turn in time sheets), that someone on a campus 30 miles away is having an anniversary, that somebody in some office is trying to get rid of some used bookcases…and on and on and on and on. This stuff floods my in-box.
But in amongst this trash are messages that I need to see: messages from the departmental chair, for example, or announcements of policy that actually applies to adjuncts. So rather than derailing ALL messages from PC, PVCC, and the two huge mailing lists at the district offices, I’ve been blacklisting offenders as they send an irrelevant message.
As a result, I’ve written scores and scores of “rules” sending messages from specific sources to “Trash.” I lost count of the number at 200.
The auto-respond adds another “rule” to this overstuffed closet of horrors. And apparently that was just one. rule. too. many.
I gather all my contacts into a BCC line, put my own e-mail address in the visible “To” line, and send out a message telling all my cronies and business contacts where to find me henceforth. So I’m sitting there configuring the new e-mail client over at Bluehost when I hear a couple of “bings” from the MacMail. Looks like bounced messages from the notice of the new e-mail address. Figures—some of these folks, I haven’t heard from in years. I think it’s rejected messages.
…heh heh heh heh heh heh heh…
385 incoming messages later, I’m on the way to the Apple store.
In the 20 minutes or so it takes to get there, another 3,000 messages cascade into MacMail. No. That’s not a typo. By the time I walk into the Apple store seeking help, well over three thousand new messages reside on the server.
I can’t make them understand what the problem is. Either they really don’t understand, or they’re working very, very hard to pretend not to understand. Since they deny knowledge of the password denial issue, I suspect the latter. This seems not to be atypical of Apple consumer policy: pretend it’s not there, and maybe it’ll go away. Finally I find a guy who realizes the 3,000++++ messages are the result of an infinite loop. The thing is sending thousands of copies of the “change email” message I sent out to my surviving contacts an hour or two before.
SHE: Generated by what?
HE:: Dunno. It’ll take an Apple Genius to figure that out. Wanna make an appointment?
SHE: You do understand that I need to use my system to do business with a client whose commerce is worth about two grand, don’t you?
HE: How about Friday afternoon?
Yeah. So I accepted an appointment at 1:15 and left, just freaking FURIOUS, and my fury having been stoked to a high pitch by the patronizing jerk who told me the solution is to turn off MacMail, as though the command to “send” or whatever it’s doing would magically go away from the iCloud server if my computers here were shut down. Right.
Anyone who’s ever hit “send,” watched it grind away interminably, then quit MacMail, gone to bed, and got up in the morning to see that MacMail sent the message during the night knows very well that turning off the program resident on a local terminal is not going to turn off whatever resides on Apple’s servers. I’ll refrain from calling the man a moron, only out of misguided courtesy.
By the time I get home from the Apple store, another 20 or 25 minutes later, something over 5200 messages from myself were crammed on the server. That’s after I deleted te 3,000-whatever off the server while was arguing with the Apple nerds.
Studying the issue, I realized this didn’t start until after I built the Auto-Responder command.
Must…delete…autorespond…rule…
So go into Preferences > Rules. There I find that all but a half-dozen of the 200+ rules I’ve written to derail nuisance e-mails from the colleges are disappeared. And of the few I can see, NONE of them is the Auto-Responder message rule.
Sumbitch.
Command-A, goddamnit!
Hm. It selected all of something.
DELETE, for the love of Gawd!
Well. Nothing remains in the dropdown menu. Could it have deleted all those rules?
Open Macbook; Preferences > rules. Command A. Delete!!!!!
Whatever was in there is gone, but it’s not all gone because some trash from the colleges is going into the “Trash” file. Oh well.
Command-Q! Command Q!
It seems to have worked. At least, it worked on my end. The endless loops of messages from me to myself, growing fuzzy subject-lines of Re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re’s like some digitized mold, have quit elbowing their way into my inbox. They’ve pretty well stopped.
On the other end? First word came in from La Maya, who’s hiding in Yarnell while she writes a book. Forty clones of the “change my e-mail address” message alit in her inbox. At this morning’s meeting of the Scottsdale Business Association: incoming armies of clones ranging in number from 15 to 40. From KJG: about 40. This means that every single message to the hundred or so “contacts” in MacMail have been showered with re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: messages.
Jeez.
Started this post this morning. It’s now 11:20 p.m. I’ve been up since midnight the night before last, with a three- or four-hour nap in the nighttime hours between Wednesday and Thursday. Yesh. That is a 42-hour day.
Hard though that may seem to believe.