Fired up Mail.app on my work laptop today for the first time in a while.
Outlook 2011, OWA (the Outlook Web interface) and my iPhone all show the same state of my inbox, with a single message in it.
Mail.app shows two messages – the one that the other guys show and one that I filed many hours ago.
Things I tried (all of which failed):
- Telling Mail.app to resynchronize
- Telling Mail.app to rebuild the mailbox
- Restarting Mail.app
- Deleting my Exchange account and adding it back (and the rebuilding the mailbox for good measure)
- Quitting Mail.app, moving my
~/Library/Mailfolder to somewhere else, Start Mail.app, go through the wizard to see up my Exchange account all over again.
Nope. Still shows those blasted two messages. The last one is rather amazing to me. If I moved the folder out of the way, that seems to me like it would be pretty much starting from scratch. If that didn’t work, I can only guess that either the OS is doing some caching that I don’t know about or the message is still on the server and Mail.app is just interpreting the server state didn’t from all the others. Strange.
It still amazes me how much trouble we all have with computers with pretty basic stuff like email, calendars, and addressbooks, and getting it all to sync. I hate crap like this, because it breaks the trust that I have in computers to do the simple stuff for me. But then if I can’t trust it, I don’t know, I might as well go back to pen and paper. Imagine how much time we could free up as a culture if we didn’t have to deal with Exchange, IMAP, ActiveSync, SyncServices, and all of that other crap that sounds nice but then fails in strange ways.