I was wondering why my home connection seemed to be crawling since yesterday. I didn’t worry too much at first, thinking that with my wife working from home yesterday as well, we were just downloading a lot of stuff between the both of us.
But the slowness persisted this morning. I took a peek at our bandwidth consumption and something became immediately obvious: there was something wrong on the upload end of things. We had somehow uploaded 2GB+ in one day, which is rather peculiar for us.
Turned out the issue at hand was an arcane bug involving Apple’s Mail.app “self-recovery”, MobileMe, Gmail, an oversized message and some kind of infinite loop.
- Tried to send a 36MB video via email to a friend a couple of days ago.
- Gmail prompted me that the message was too large, as they have a 34MB upload limit.
- Mail.app kept trying to save it to my draft folder but likely kept getting the same Gmail error, silently.
- Mail.app kept on “rescuing” copies of the said message in a “recovered messages” folder.
- Mobile Me kept trying to sync my mail accounts.
- Repeat ad nauseam.
I ended up solving the issue by simply trashing my entire ~/Library/Mail folder on my iMac, replacing it with a quasi-identical copy from my MacBook Pro and resyncing my mail accounts.
Problem now seems to be gone. Won’t get bitten by this one again…
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