I was excited that the boss picked up a Mac Mini for the office, because that meant I finally got to use Lion’s email client for work. No longer did I have to put up with Thunderbird’s crap!
So I sit down and begin setting it up. I work in tech support, and while the company is relatively small, I still get a high volume of email, about a thousand per day on slower weeks. I thought Mail.app would handle it at least as well as Thunderbird does, but apparently I was wrong.
It seemed to have downloaded the backlog of 350,000 emails without issue, but then began a CPU-maxing mystery process that continues even now, 6 hours after the download finished. During this process, which persisted through quits-then-force-quits of the client, no new email would arrive, so I spent the day with two email clients open. One was operating just fine if a bit slugish, and the other was bogging my whole system down while being totally useless.
I’ll continue attempting to get it to work because I still think Lion’s email client is the best in the field right now, but it doesn’t seem like it’s ready for prime time just yet. Very disappointing.
Update: After some research, it looks like the CPU-pegging process is actually Mail.app doing a fulltext index of my email. That’s neat and all, but it’d be nice to have some feedback that that’s what is happening. The “Mail Activity” pane is totally empty.