Apple versus Google

 Apple versus Google

There is said to be a ‘cold war’ between Apple and Facebook (New Statesman 16-22 July 2021). There may also be a rivalry between Apple and Google. 

I have spent three days trying to get to the bottom of this puzzling problem. My ageing MacBookPro is getting slower and slower. On Monday this week I noticed that it was (in its own words) “Downloading 98,000 emails”. Which is quite daft. And after watching the first 1,000 come down, it was clear that the machine would be out of commission for the whole day. I did not want any of those emails. I do not mind Google storing all my mail (going back 15 years) on its capacious servers; if it wants to do that. But I keep on my MacBook the emails I want to keep, and delete the 2/3 that I do not want.

I found that unplugging the power inlet stopped the nonsense. Then I tried ‘googling’ the problem and found considerable discussion from the period 2017-2019. Thus, an article by Elizabeth Jones from 2019 is titled “Mail App Always Downloading on Mac? How-To Fix” (https://appletoolbox.com/mac-mail-app-always-downloading-fix/). She recognised the problem, and tried to meet it, suggesting:

• Relaunch the Mail app while holding the Shift key on your keyboard;
• Change your mail account’s setting for storing the Drafts Mailbox Behaviors to “On My Mac”;
• Take your Mail Account offline temporarily and then take them back online
• Remove the Mail Account and then add it back;
• Try rebuilding and reindexing your Mailbox.

Five remedies immediately aroused my suspicions. Why not cut to the chase and use the right fix? But I tried the first 3, setting all my email addresses to “store drafts in a ‘drafts’ folder on the MacBook; with no immediate benefit. (The last two seemed excessively (in medical parlance) "invasive".)

I surfed further, till I came to the suggestion of emptying the Draft Emails box, (easily done but useless), then the deeper suggestion of going to the G-mail site on a web browser and emptying the Draft Emails box there. Now, that was interesting. For there were 2,100 draft emails visible on the browser web-mail site, but none when I used AppleMail’s IMAP approach.

Well, after breakfast, I started to delete these 2,100 drafts. But they only emerged singly, or at best 8 at a time. This was going to be tedious. A draft appeared called “North Downs way”, was selected, deleted, but then up it popped, again; like the Hydra’s head. I seemed not to be gaining on the monster, till I noticed that the number of remaining drafts did reduce each time; 2,000, 1,999, 1998 etc.. Then I twigged! While writing an email, the Apple Mailer records a draft every 20 seconds or so, all under the same name as in the subject line. There may be 20, or 80 drafts of a single email. 

By mid-afternoon I had got rid of 1,100 of my unwanted drafts, but 1,000 remained. 

Some people like “threading” emails into “conversations”, so that if you reply this week to mine of last week they are stored together. I do not. I like my emails to appear in date order, and I had found and unticked the “Please thread my emails” option on AppleMail. With a stroke of genius, I thought to go to the web-mail “settings” and re-tick the threading option there. Now, like ‘Jack-the-Giant-Killer’ each swipe got rid of 50 or 100 drafts all dangling on that silly ’thread’’. In two more minutes the job was done. I had freed up 1 GByte of Google storage space.

But I was now in open country, on my own and ahead of all the boffins and commentators. No one had suggested that the problem was to do with ’threading’ . Could it be that Apple defaults to no-threading, Google to threading? Or did Apple misunderstand Google’s signal for threading? Or, (more sinisterly) did Google deliberately change the signal without telling Apple? They both emerge from the affair a little “muddy”.

I am still bothered by a slow machine. And am highly scornful of the way Apple has messed around with its iCloud (giving me 2, 4, and sometimes 8 copies of each photo). And of its aloof indifference to customers’ problems. And at the way perfectly good hardware becomes obsolete, and needs replacing. 

I hope this train of thought might be useful to some others. 

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