Mail.app: Troubleshooting goes pear-shaped
Wednesday, July 12th, 2006
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.
Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, disaster, mail.app, troubleshooting, Whoops lost the lot
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