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

Sometimes attempts to sync Address Book using iSync will fail and produce an error message as cryptic as the cause of the error itself.

The message will read something like this:

This tells you that there is a problem with the phone record of person “‘EC776A4A-91ED-11D9-82C9-00112479516E:ABPerson.”

Helpful, eh?

Michael Lafferty has written a small utility, ABFinder, that helps to troubleshoot this problem.

Entering the long alphanumeric string into this utility will disclose which person’s record is causing the problem, so that you can remove or replace the offending data and get a successful sync.

ABFiller is freeware and available with a helpful readme in this zip file.Address Book, iSync, cryptic error messages, troubleshooting, tips

On the Apple Discussion Forums, Sturmdrang provides an oddly effective and very seasonal Thanksgiving troubleshooting tip:

“Wait one day and try it again.”

Have a good and thankful day!