So Mail.bloody.app has just chewed up and spat out around two-years of e-mail from my lovely Mac and not even Danny O’Brien could fix it for me, so that’s pretty bloody annoying. And of course while I used to take regular back-ups, it’s been just long enough after the last time that this happened for me to (1) stop taking back-ups several months ago and (2) have deleted the back-ups I had made to make space for other crap.
Which leaves me in the unenviable position of asking anyone and everyone who was expecting anything from me or had planned to do something with me or with whom I’ve been talking recently in pretty much any capacity to get back in touch and remind me where we’d got to in the whole bloody conversation. I feel a bit like the guy in Memento at the moment, only on a much much larger (but no less fatal) timescale.
13 replies on “Assmonkeying Mail.app needs to be kicked to death…”
I miss Claris Emailer.
As an entirely unhelpful closing-barn-door-horse-bolted suggestion, IMAP boxes kinda remove this hazard, unless the mail server goes tits-up, and that’s unusual.
$20 a year Fastmail account gives you 600 meg now, or will as soon as they get round to implementing it.
(incidentally, comment posting gave me an “enter your name” error even though I signed in with typepad)
tom, i’ll forward a copy of your email where you offered me that free trip to hawaii. xox
Eeep, sorry to hear about that Tom, it’s a danger of pretty much any locally stored mail program. Might I suggest you consider IMAP and keep all your mail server side? Has lots of other advantages too.
Also, I found investing in a cheap firewire HDD and using Disk Utility to backup my whole system now and then quite handy. Can even make it bootable should the internal HDD fail in your Powerbook (already happened to me once).
I think no one takes backups seriously until we’ve had at least one (but sometimes more) horrible, awful, no-backups-everything’s-gone experience. Here’s mine. (It happened to me twice.) I have to say, though, that if you not only stopped making regular backups, but also _deleted_ your old ones, you’ve been treading on very thin ice for some time. Of course, you know that now, so I shouldn’t be rubbing it in, should I?
Links of interest (2004-09-26)
If you not only stop maintaining your backups, but actually delete the old ones, you’re on thin ice.
Reminder: you owe me 10 quid. From that last email.
Much as I love Apple, Mail has done that to me too many times and I use Entourage now.
And there was me just about to switch to Mail.app after Entourage did exactly the same to me on Friday. Sigh.
I’ve got all my mail backed up via Gmail (incoming and sent items) and it’s yet another reminder to get a Zoe server up and runing at home.
Just need to sort out one of those Python gmail exporters now…
It’s a black day, isn’t it. Well, I had to do a format & reinstall the other day, as you generally do need to when running \/\/indows. I backed up about 68Gb to DDS3 tapes, with verify on, then restored all the tapes, just to make sure they worked.
Format, reinstall, restore….restore….restore? Oh no, sorry, “Please see the removable storage MMC”. WTF? There’s nothing to see, not in the Event Viewer, nothing! Well, that’s about 6.5Gb of mail since 1997, loads of docs, pictures (normal, everyday, *clean* pictures :), and misc other stuff.
I suppose I’m a bit of a hoarder in many ways, but that was my data, dammit! What right did the magnetic gods have to take it from me?
*sigh*
I suppose I’ll get over it, but damn, it’s not nice.
I feel for you buddy.
Bleah.
Don’t forget you should be able to strip at least the text out of your mailbox folders: the unix command is strings IIRC: “strings mbox > mboxtext”. This will at least let you manually find things you know about.
IMAP is OK but try to get one with a webmail interface as occasionally your client app’s configs corrupt irretrievably (happened to me recently)
POP3 fudge: set your client app to leave mail on the server for, say, 30 days. Effectively a rolling snailtrail email backup.
Easy to forget backup. And doesn’t it suck. I have LifeBalance set to nudge me for 3 rolling backups on alternating fortnights, giving me a month-and-a-half rollback ability (great for when you discover only corruption later) and average loss of only a week. But if you have the cash, here’s an idea for an effortless constant backup: plug in say a £100 drive internally, Retrospect scheduled to incrementally backup data daily + weekly grand/fathers. Protects transparently against corruption & accident, if not fire & theft.
And there was me thinking I was lone sufferer. Only had one mail wipeout so far, but does anyone else suffer the endless ‘completing address’ problem? Given the recent success with Jeff Bezos, maybe someone should email Steve Jobs and ask him to fix mail.
>fix mail
Eudora
Core architecture from the same people who brought you Mosaic/Netscape: NCSA; and still the benchmark mail app.