I doubt most people are aware of the problems to start, so it’s just not coming up. Certainly, if you buy a new Mac, you don’t really have much of a choice.
I also suspect that the problems aren’t that widespread or necessarily reproducible, and a lot of people really don’t care enough about email to notice or worry about it.
And, as @Shamino said, plenty of people who might be aware of the issues don’t use Mail.
Unlike @Shamino I actually use Mail.app a lot, basically almost exclusively (apart from rare web interface use or mutt sessions via remote ssh). I can only say that although I was very worried about the Mail.app bugs initially, and read and double-checked everything I could on the matter before hesitantly upgrading to Catalina, it ended up working without a hitch.
And to this day, my Catalina Mail.app has been performing exactly as it had under Mojave. Mostly well, with two or three annoyances (one I just recently noted here on TidBITS Talk). I have to this day experienced zero email loss or had to restore anything from backup and that’s the case for all my accounts: iCloud, Gmail for work, and my private IMAP server for personal stuff.
Not trying to generalize or say these issues aren’t real (I have no doubt they are), just trying to point out they are not necessary universal and that for some of us there has been a path forward with Catalina that appears to have worked quite well. Thank goodness, since you really have no choice when you get a new Mac.
[I realize I probably should never have written this and that I just jinxed myself. Ugh.] ;)
I use exclusively Mail.app, for a quite large traffic of email (~ 100 a day; I use it as an Exchange365 client).
I also never ever had any issue with Mail.app since I installed Catalina version 0.0.It surely is an issue, but AFAIK it is an issue for a quite small minority of users.
I installed Big Sur few days ago, and everything works as it should.
I insta
Is there going to be a Take Control of Updating to Big Sur book?
When I purchased a new iMac 2019 it came with Catalina and I was very nervous that it would be a mess. Actually had no problem at all. Worked fine from the very start. I use Apple Mail as my main email program and have had no problems at all. The iMac allowed me to reformat and restore my MBP 2013 (using High Sierra) which had become corrupted and I wanted to have a good computer before trying to fix that. It all worked out and again, my main point, I’ve had no problems with Catalina but it was installed from the get go on the new iMac.
We’re not associated with Take Control anymore, but Joe Kissell’s book has been out for a bit.
Yes, I have that one. He usually puts out a book devoted to the upgrade. Haven’t seen it yet.
Thanks
He combined the books this year.
Thanks for letting me know that. I hadn’t opened it yet. I’m still going to take TB’s advice and wait to upgrade until you say so. Thanks again.
New tabs in Safari show up instantly for me on a 2019 MBP 16". If it’s taking up to 10 seconds, I would suspect there’s something weird going on with your system.
The date and time item can be customized in the Dock & Menu Bar preference pane. You can turn off the date completely, but not the clock. If you opt for an analog clock, however, it won’t take up much space in the menu bar.
We’re curious to see if Apple’s new M1-equipped Macs ship with 11.0 or 11.0.1.
My M1 Mac Mini arrived with macOS 11.0.
Yes, there just wasn’t enough time after 11.0.1 went GM to get it to hardware manufacturing to install on initial shipments, nor open sealed boxes to update them. I would expect those coming off the production line now to get 11.0.1.
What could that be? No time to experiment right now, but turning off plug-ins may be the way to go…
I don’t have anything like that in my preferences. Does the picture look like what you have?
OK, found it. But I would not have looked for Date&Time preferences outside the Date&Time preferences in a million years; that is MS territory.
Thanks for the pointer!
“Well, there’s spam egg sausage and spam, that’s not got much spam in it.”
You seriously can’t turn off the menu bar clock in Big Sur? I’ve been using alternative menu bar clocks for a couple of decades. Okay, it’s a trivial thing, but it sure sounds annoying.
Extensions were the first thought that occurred to me. You could try set up a new user and see if you can replicate the problem on a clean account.
Yeah, I only found it because someone on another site was lamenting the disappearance of the battery percentage in the menu bar but then eventually found the setting in the Dock & Menu Bar pref pane.
For some reason, Apple decided to combine to get rid of the Notification Center menu icon and place notifications under the clock. So, yes, it is a fixture for the menu bar. It would be nice if you had the alternative of using an icon appropriate for the Notification Center if you didn’t want to use Apple’s clock.
This.
I agree with Apple fewer icons up there is great, but unlike myself, not everybody might want to have a clock up there. They could have for example simply chosen to start displaying the Catalina NC icon if a user selects to not display a clock.
In the old days I’d probably submit this as feedback, but after all the discussions we’ve had here, it feels like Apple doesn’t really care about getting that kind of feedback there.
I did an interesting (to me at least) thing today.
I’m running Mojave on my iMac. When Catalina was released, I knew there were some apps that wouldn’t run under it that I use every day, but they should run fine in a VM, so I made a Mojave VM in VMWare Fusion. When Catalina turned out to be a train wreck, I never upgraded, but I kept the Mojave VM up-to-date. Yesterday I booted it to apply the latest updates, and noticed it was offering me Big Sur. Hmmm…
So I cloned the VM, told it to install Big Sur, and after probably an hour or so, I have a Big Sur VM running on Mojave. I didn’t do a lot with it, but it seems to work just fine.
Why would one want to do this? I did it to play around with Big Sur without updating my main machine or finding an external drive to install it on. One could also use it to make sure your primary apps run fine on it, or to run future (or current) apps that will only run on Big Sur. Not something everybody, or even very many people will want to do, but if you do, it’s nice to know it works.
Is there a suggested backup/recovery strategy for email before I upgrade off of Mojave? I’m thinking of Eagle Filer or some similar external program? I’ve heard there are issues using Time Machine for this purpose if the backups were made pre-Big Sur.
Does the loss of mail only occur at the time of upgrade? Or, is it an on-going problem?
Eventually I’ll have to upgrade beyond Mojave. But, I like Mail and am loath to move twenty-five plus years of messages to another client. But, maybe an external archiver would solve the data-loss problem and free me from lock-in on Apple Mail…
