David Buxton at Reliably Broken has written a good explanation of the way Apple Mail treats email in POP and IMAP accounts, contrasting it (at the end) with the way Entourage handles each protocol.

As he notes:

Now when you go to remove an IMAP account Mail.app deletes all the local mailboxes for that IMAP account. This is not a problem, after all those local mailboxes are simple caches; the only reason the client keeps a copy is as a performance optimisation (as noted above).

Now when you remove a POP account Mail.app deletes all messages sent or received via that account, even though there will be no copy of those messages on the server (especially true for sent messages).

Not paying attention to this often has tragic results, as you can read in “The Mail POP Disaster: When it’s gone, it’s gone” and in Apple’s Mail Discussions (passim).

David dislikes this behaviour for POP accounts. He concludes: “This is not useful or intuitive – it is a bad design.” And he is not alone, by any means.

What do you think?

Not normally a huge Apple fan-boi, I actually side with the company on this one.

First, Apple gives you a big, fat warning when you attempt to delete a POP account, telling you quite plainly what will happen next — that this action will delete the settings, mailboxes and messages associated with that account:

Secondly, this behaviour makes sense. When you think of “an email account”, do you think of just the settings, or the mailboxes and email in that account as well? When users want to delete an account, Apple is right to take them at their word, and to delete everything.

Or to put it another way, to what extent are companies like Apple obliged to protect users from themselves? Some of my friends in User Support have strong (maximised) views on this, but may not be completely disinterested.

I might be wrong. I am open to persuasion. It just looks to me like Apple is getting panned for designing a process that actually does what the user wants.

Of course, the real moral of the story is not about design. It is backup, backup, backup!

It’s not Apple’s fault that so few people make them. I remember being appalled to learn during the 2006 WWDC Keynote that “only about four percent of users are utilizing automated software for backing up important files — only a quarter of users back up in any way whatsoever on a regular basis.” (Thanks to MacWorld for a transcript of the event)

Since Leopard, there’s no reason (apart from the performance hit and a few small annoyances) why people aren’t running Time Machine. Or one of the many other excellent backup solutions.

Just make sure that you are backing up up all the Mail files you should be.

Tyler Hall at Sitening provides a detailed account of his backup strategy.

He divides his data up into six categories depending on how frequently he backs it up and how he does it.

Email backups, he writes, are all taken care of by Mail.app. He downloads all this Gmail into Mail using Gmail’s POP access and all his IMAP emails are mirrored in Mail.app’s local cache.

Preference files, the ~/Library/Mail and ~/Library/Mail Downloads folders, which are essential parts of a sensible Mail.app backup plan, are taken care by another backup process.

SuperDuper (“Heroic system recovery for mere mortals”) is the backup app of choice.backups, mail.app, apple mail, gmail, tips

BackityMac is clever utility that offers pre-set, one-click settings for backing up your Mail, iCal and Address Book data into a disk image—see a previous post for screenshots and brief review.

An updated version was released on Saturday, making it even more useful than before.

It can now burn the image it makes to CD, DVD and Dual-layer DVD. Large images are segmented and spanned across multiple discs.

It will also ask for an administrator password before backing up a Home directory.

BackityMac also has pre-sets for iTunes, iPhoto and iWeb data, browser bookmarks and a full Home directory backup.

BackityMac is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .BackityMac, backups, ical, address book, mail.app, apple mail

Bob at Google Blogoscoped had a bad day last week. He discovered that Google had deleted his entire Gmail account without warning.

It’s quite a disaster for him personally: “I use it religiously and it is my primary email account. I have over 300mb of CRUCIAL data in my email, none of which I have backups for.”

And it’s a reminder of two things for everyone else.

First, backups are golden. Whether you use webmail or Mail.app, a daily backup routine or mirror of your emails will save your bacon one day. Just ask Bob. Then find out what makes up a complete backup of your Mail.app data.

Secondly, Gmail has a statement in its terms of service that every Gmail user should read:

We may modify or terminate our services from time to time, for any reason, and without notice, including the right to terminate with or without notice, without liability to you, any other user or any third party. We reserve the right to modify these Terms of Service from time to time without notice…
…Google disclaims any and all responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, completeness, legality, reliability, or operability or availability of information or material displayed in the GOOGLE SERVICES results. Google disclaims any responsibility for the deletion, failure to store, misdelivery, or untimely delivery of any information or material.

Gmail, backups, nasty surprise, terms of service, mail.app, apple mail, email, data security