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Mail.app: Troubleshooting goes pear-shaped

homer_dohA poster in the Apple Mail.app discussions tells one of those tragic troubleshooting stories that lingers in the mind forever. Remember the guy who lost everything when trying to reinstall Mail.app from the Installation disks? Who could forget.

In this case, the poster was trying to track down a bug that was causing one of his email accounts in Mail.app to play up. So, he created a duplicate account with all the same settings and account information.

He found the same problem in the second account. So (and, in retrospect, this is where things really started to go off the rails), he deleted the second account and lost everything. All the mail in both the original and the duplicate account disappeared.

Why did this happen? Mail.app creates folders to store your emails based on your account name and type. (See “What’s in your Mail folder?” for more).

Deleting one identically named account removed the messages from both. Luckily he had a backup.

As Allan Sampson points out in a reply to the original post, there should be a warning, but who ever pays any attention to those? Better just not to do it in the first place.mail.app, apple mail, disaster, troubleshooting, Whoops lost the lot, tips

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 12th July, 2006 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Apple Mail Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Mail.app: Troubleshooting goes pear-shaped”

  1. Stephen says:
    July 13th, 2006 at 12:08 am

    What do you mean by “play up”?

  2. Tim says:
    July 13th, 2006 at 12:23 am

    “misbehave”, “act in an unexpected fashion”.

  3. walter says:
    July 14th, 2006 at 12:26 am

    I am sick and tired of Mail.app interfering with my settings after every sync or software update…. is there not a way to “lock” account settings in Mail.app? Maybe you can speak to the developers. For e.g.. On one of my accounts i _only_ use it to send emails. I only use to receive once in a blue moon. So i have that account under Advanced tab, UNCHECKED for “Include when automatically checking for new mail”…. but this always gets re-set to check after SW updates or Sync. I WANT IT LOCKED please ;-)

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