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

A 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

MailTunes is a free-standing app that provides you with a dynamically changing signature for your emails. By default it contains info about the track currently playing in iTunes, but it can be configured to report uptime or anything else you know how to ring out of its shell script.

This sounds like a great idea, but I can’t get it to work. It reports all sorts of alarming messages in the Console like this,

and this,

Then Mail hangs. As an added bonus it has erased all my existing signatures.

Perhaps it’s my fault. It often is. Perhaps it’s not compatible with Tiger (although there’s no warning about that on the developer’s website).

UPDATE: Mystery solved. The developer Tomas replied to my email with lightning speed (Thanks). He writes,

MailTunes does not work in Tiger yet, unfortunately. This is a bug in Apple Mail that prevents scripts from setting the contents of signatures. I have reported it, and the best I can do at this time is to hope this bug is one of the ones fixed in the upcoming OS X 10.4.3. When it’s fixed, the current version of MailTunes should begin working again. I do have a newer version in the works, but I didn’t see any point in releasing it until this problem is resolved.

So, a plug-in to look forward to. Or to enjoy if you are still on Panther or Jaguar.
Apple Mail, mail.app, signatures, iTunes, Tiger, disaster, plugins