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Mavericks Mail's spam-spewing 'flaw' was scripted by red-faced user

FastMail says sorry for crying wolf, is still grumpy Mavericks Mail don't speak no good IMAP

FastMail, the cloudy messaging outfit that earlier this week proclaimed it had found a nasty bug in the way OS X Mavericks' Mail client talks IMAP, has retracted its analysis.

The title of the new post, “Apple mail 'bug' turns out to be user script after all” tells you most of what you need to know about the situation.

Here's the detail. FastMail got in touch with Apple, which in turn chatted to the user with the spam-spawning situation. After they conversed for a time, FastMail reports the following outcome:

“A very embarassed user discovered an applescript he wrote years ago to move mail from OS X Mail’s 'semantic junk' folder to the real Junk folder at FastMail where our bayes trainer could learn from it.”

What has changed is that OS X Mail now correctly detects the \Junk special-use on the folder at our server, and sets the semantic trash to be that folder – meaning he was moving messages from that folder to the same folder.”

That leaves lots of egg on the user's face and a bit on FastMail's too. The company goes on to make the point that IMAP is far from perfect, Mavericks Mail is using it in odd ways and other email clients also make odd choices or implement IMAP badly.

Welcome to the imperfect world of the internet, FastMail. ®

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