Apple Mail: The Yosemite Progress Report
Now that 10.10 Yosemite has been available for a couple of months (and the 10.10.1 update has been out for a month), I wanted to revisit the status of Apple Mail. Is it safe to use yet (or again)? Did Apple fix (fill-in-your-favorite-bug-here)? Are the new features worth it? Has Apple finally given Mail the care and attention it has needed for so long?
The short version is that Mail is (for better and worse) about as reliable as it was in Mavericks. There are a few interesting new features, a few odd changes, and a few bugs. But for the most part, if Mail was working for you in (later versions of) Mavericks, you’ll have the same experience using Yosemite. If it wasn’t working for you in Mavericks, you’re not likely to find it substantially improved.
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If you want to know whether Mail “finally” plays nice with Gmail or Exchange, all I can really say as the most casual user of both account types is that I don’t notice anything significantly different from the way Mail worked in Mavericks. That is, there are no fundamental design changes, but at least some of the bugs that existed in 10.9.5 still exist in 10.10.1.
My own experience is that most of the bugs from Mavericks have been fixed, though there are a few new ones. Apple Mail was stable for me with Mavericks; with Yosemite, it now crashes and beachballs multiple times per day. I cannot recall a version that was less stable. I’ve also seen reports of a new bug where rules don’t always reliably move messages to another mailbox.
Like Kissell, I have heard of lots of problems with the new “Automatically detect and maintain account settings” option and recommend against using it.
Update (2014-12-23): There’s some discussion of this on App.net.
