I Had A Moment

You know the kind, when a solution just falls out of the sky and you look like a complete fucking genius? When your co-workers start kissing your feet and bringing you chocolate and flowers?

Yeah, one of those.

Several of my users at work have been having a particularly maddening problem with their Mail application on their Intel-based Macs. Very long hangs when replying to e-mails with formatted text (why people insist on pink text in e-mail is beyond me) or when attaching files. Aggravating beyond belief.

At first I thought it was just one machine, and I suspected that the e-mail client was having trouble with the fact that this person probably has seven years worth of e-mails archived. Then it happened to another user. And another. And another.

What the fuck?

I’d been Googling all over the place, trying to track something down, and I was also trying random solutions as they occurred to me. Cleaned all the system caches, reinstalled the system software, sacrificed a chicken, indulged in stream-of-consciousness profanity. Nothin’.

I was beginning to feel like an idiot.

This afternoon I finally put together what all of these users have in common: They’re all running Parallels Desktop for Mac, which is a virtualization program which allows Mac users to run Windowze without having to reboot.

So I started poking around in the network preferences, and found a couple of Parallels settings. Even though they were at the bottom of the list (meaning they were checked last) they were still being polled by the e-mail client in these cases. Turn those off and, hey-presto, suddenly Mail is a halfway useful e-mail client again.

I honestly feel like the answer just dropped out of the sky and landed on my head.

I left work an hour early; there was no way I was gonna top that, so why even try.

Sometimes I’m a fucking genius.