I hate to go on endlessly about Fastmail , but how sweet is this announcement today?!

All users email is now on replicated servers. This means that every email delivered or deleted and every email action performed is replicated within a second to a completely separate server with a completely separate copy of all users emails.

We now have at least three levels of redundancy, three copies of every email, and all those copies are on RAID redundant storage themselves.

1. All users now have their email stored on a system with RAID disks and all servers and RAID arrays have dual power supplies. This means a single drive or power supply failure should cause no interruption to service at all, we just replace the drive/power supply while the system is live and online…
2. All users now have their email replicated to an identical replica system (RAID drives, dual power supplies, etc). Each system is completely separate…. The replication is performed at the semantic email level, not at the filesystem level. So a filesystem corruption on the source server will not be replicated. This means if there is a disk or filesystem corruption on a single machine, we can just switch to the replica…
3. All users have their email store backed up incrementally each night to a separate system and RAID array. The backups of email are kept for 1 week after the email is deleted to allow restoring in case of accident. In an emergency situation if both a master and replica server should fail catastrophically, we can still perform a restore from this backup…

[Full text ]email, backup, redundancy, fastmail, RAID, IMAP, redundant storage, sweet dreams

A poster on macOSXHints provides an applescipt which will backup the data files from iCal, Address Book and Delicious Library as well as bookmarks from Camino and del.icio.us.

It’s useful as it is, especially if you use those apps, but the poster also hopes that readers will “glean parts that are relevant to your system/apps or adapt the whole thing or even add to it”.

If you are a beginner at AppleScript (like me) you will be interested to see the section for the del.icio.us bookmarks, which shows how AppleScript can tab through the fields of a web page.

The poster wrote this script after “a few frustrating losses of data”. A warning to us all.ical, address book, camino, applescript, backup, de.lico.us, bookmarks

In the hunt for a solid, comprehensive backup solution for his IMAP accounts, Rui Carmo (Tao of Mac) has produced a python script that will copy all the emails from an IMAP account, do it all as safely as possible and generate mbox-formatted files that can be imported into Mail.app and is completely and utterly free.

You can’t ask for more than that!

Not being very smart about these things, I asked him why he didn’t just copy Mail.app’s local caches. He set me straight:

Well, the caches aren’t portable, aren’t in a standardized format, are not guaranteed to be complete (remember the Preferences: you may or may not cache messages, and even then you’re only sure of those you actually downloaded), and they don’t necessarily store the original message contents as they arrived to your server.

Not only that, doing it this way makes the backup useful for people whatever mail client they use.

He hopes to wrap the whole thing in a shiny GUI soon, but for the moment it’s command-line only.

Rui is looking for feedback and testers to help improve the script even more. You can get the script and leave your helpful comments on his web site .

[Thanks to Jacob Rus for the "aquafied" Python image. Check out more nice Mac-friendly icons from Python's future at his web site ]mail.app, apple mail, email, imap, backup, mbox, python, script, tips, local caches

Maza Digital has re-released its Email Backup app as a shareware app called Email Backup Pro.

It offers a simple schedule for the complete backup of messages and settings in Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora and MS Entourage X and 2004. The shareware version adds a restore option and comes with an optional add-on to manage backups on external harddrives.

The interface clearly presents options for the location and timing of the backups and the number of backup to save:

If you want to save your backups to an external drive that is not always connected, an additional freeware app Email Backup On Mount is provided.

It watches for the mounting on the remote drive and prompts you to do a backup when it is connected. It also offers menubar access to Email Backup Pro’s main features.

The backups are compressed as zip files with the date of the backup and the extension .ebp, which helps with subsequent identification and saves space.

Restoring the backup is as easy as selecting “Restore” from the app’s Tools menu.

Email Backup Pro costs USD 9.95 and a demo version (with scheduling disabled) is available from the developer’s web site .

Documentation is not included in the download, but is available separately.email, backup, restore, apple mail, mail.app, eudora, thunderbird, entourage

Over the weekend I updated the Hawk Wings Add-on and Plug-in List.

Ten new entries were added, making a total of 130+ add-ons, plugins, scripts and helpful apps to make working with Mail.app, iCal and Address Book quicker, smarter and more productive:

1. AddressX (Get Exchange contacts in Address Book) was added to the Address Book section.
2. Next Unread Message (Applescript to move to next unread message) was added to the Added Functionality section.
3. Export Address Book (easy merges of Address Book data with Word, FileMaker) was added to the Address Book section.
4. Note to Self (quick notes to yourself in Mail.app à la Leopard Mail) was added to the Added Functionality section.
5. Email Backup (quick, one-step back up for mail.app, thunderbird and more) was added to the Archiving section.
6. OMiC (plugin wrapper for tnef.sourceforge.net to extract winmail.dat files) was added to the Added Functionality section.
7. Mail to Yojimbo (script to pipe emails from Mail.app to Yojimbo) was added to the Integration with other apps section.
8. Mail Unread Menu (discreet menubar notification for Mail.app) was added to the Notification section.
9. Return Receipts AppleScript (request return receipts from email clients that support them) was added to the Added Functionality section.
10. MailPod (script to copy emails to any iPod) was added to the Added Functionality section.

mail.app, apple mail, applescript, plugins, addons, productivity, backup, notification, ipod, address book, exchange server

My RSS reader NetNewsWire served up a tragic Apple Mail story today.

A poster on the macOSXHints forums had a very bad day :

So I was having trouble with one of my POP3 accounts in Mail.app. It was locking up when receiving the last message. It’s safe to say that this problem is already fixed.

In the process of fixing it I decided to remove the account and re-add it (a common solution in MS Outlook). When I deleted the account I did not realize that it also deletes the folder with all your messages in it with out noticing me! So I lost all of my email in that folder (stupid me didn’t have a backup of that box). Is there anyway to get it back? I tried using Data Rescue X but it pretty much just recovered files that were already there (unless I am using it wrong).

Please help! Thank you!

The sad thing is that there is no help. When you delete a POP account in Mail.app, it doesn’t just delete the settings. It deletes the lot. Gone.

Of course, it’s not helpful after the fact to point out that Mail warns you first:

Or that you should have a backup.

Or that MS Outlook is an unreliable guide for life as a whole.

Or that IMAP is an email protocol with many advantages.

Still, it’s not after the fact for most readers here (yet).mail.app, apple mail, backup, POP, IMAP, disaster, data loss

Email Backup, a simple and easy-to-use email backup utility that I posted about just last week, has been updated, adding support for Thunderbird and Eudora.

The app can now do backups for all the major Mac email clients, which can be selected from the main interface:

It’s not an ideal solution. Restoring one of its backups has to be done manually. It doesn’t back up some of the things that I think are essential for Mail.app.

But it’s a lot better than nothing. And it’s free.

Email Backup is available from the developer’s web site .backup, apple mail, mail.app, entourage, files, schedule, better safe than sorry, Thunderbird, Eudora