News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

February 12, 2008

updates

Apple gets fed up with GrowlMail

Posted Feb. 12, ’08, 7:43 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Software » Updates

Mail.app For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why Leopard Mail.app seemed to lock up and crash constantly soon after I moved up to Leopard. Eventually, I figured out that it was Growl’s Mail.app plugin. Of course, by that point, I’d choked Apple’s bug report collection servers with crash report after crash report.

I’m not so naive as to think I was the only one. Think about the thousands of Growl and GrowlMail users that moved up to Leopard. Think about each of them crashing multiple times a day. Imagine being tasked with investigating several thousand bug report that all have nothing to do with the code that you’re responsible for. I could see my patience wearing thin fast. How else do you explain getting called out by name in Apple’s release notes?

Mail now automatically disables the (unsupported) third-party plugin GrowlMail version 1.1.2 or earlier to avoid issues.

Embarrassing. With Mail.appetizer lacking a Leopard update, I thought GrowlMail would be a good, supported, updated alternative. As it stands, it still isn’t sadly. In fact, it’s more likely to crash Mail.app than anything.


5 Comments

Alex said:

While I do not doubt growl mail may have interfered with mail.app in leopard, all of the problems concerning locking on, failing to update, etc. are all problems I have consistently experienced without growl loaded. I am very pleased with 10.5 overall, but when it comes to this version of mail.app it reminds me of the days I used to run windows. I had great hopes for the features mail.app was supposed to add i.e., reminders, but they tend to cause more problems than good when linked to gmail and my iphone.

February 12, 2008 8:53 AM
fletcher Author Profile Page said:

A good rule of troubleshooting a crashing program is to remove third-party plug-ins and then add them back in one by one. Plug-ins, kernel extensions, and haxies can all cause problems which can be difficult to debug since they aren't really occurring in the application, but in third-party code.

When I move to a new system version or a new application version I try not to bring plug-ins forward until I've tried out the base functionality. Sometimes new features make the plug-ins unnecessary and sometimes it is wise to wait until the developer has a chance to release their first update of the plug-in.

February 12, 2008 9:27 AM
Khürt Williams Author Profile Page said:

Are we sure that Growl is the culprit here? After yesterday's update I noticed that Mail.app only occasionally responds to "Mail Content of this Page".

February 12, 2008 9:43 AM
Dan Moren Author Profile Page said:

@Khürt: I don't think Derik's suggesting that Growl is the root of all of Mail.app's problems—just a significant enough subset that disabling it would save a lot of grief. I'd been using that version of Growl, and while I hadn't had any significant crashes, Growl wasn't working quite right either. Hopefully they'll release an updated version of the plug-in with full compatibility in the future, and we can put this behind us. ;)

February 12, 2008 11:35 AM
crosseyed said:

It's about time the last version I could use was .76 under 10.4.11. But if you talk to their developers they will fight you to the death that Growl is actually working and that it's just their plugins that need to be re-written.

I see no difference between the plugins or main program. It's one bundle to me and that means Growl doesn't work. I liked it when it worked but at the rate they move to fix problems I'm glad Apple has nixed it.

Apple just needs to make a built in option off various notifications of your choice. I would love to see growl be replaced by something superior.

February 12, 2008 1:59 PM

Leave a comment

 



Visit other IDG sites: