If anyone sent me any interesting mail to my pookzilla.com account over the past day you might want to resend it. OS X Mail just ate my pookzilla.com inbox. I was able to archive it before it happened but I’ve effectively lost the ability to easily search through 3 years of mail. Color me pissed the hell off.
It all started this morning when I realized I hadn’t gotten any new mail since about noon yesterday. Thinking this was weird, I logged into my webmail and found about 100 mail waiting for me. Going back to Mail, I checked my connection and everything appeared to work fine. I went into my settings and just for the hell of it changed my password to gibberish. I synched again and lo - the connection still seemed to be working! Nothing I did would reset the account to a state where it would pop new mail from the server. Reluctantly, I archived my mail and added a new account. I did a pop and got down about 150 new mail.
Thinking I was out of the woods I briefly scanned my subject lines and then did a rebuild of my Mailbox - god knows why. When it was done I now had NO mail in my inbox! I still had mail in my secondary sorted folders (the ones that I used to sift through my mailing list mail) but my main inbox was empty. What’s more, all of the mail was gone from webmail as well! Whatever it did, it deleted the mail in both places despite my settings for the account saying “never delete.”
So not only have I lost the ability to browse Mail for the past three years but I’ve totally lost all personal Mail from the past 24 hours. From my brief scan of the subject lines I know I lost some stuff from people and I apologize for that.
When I get home tonight I will give Time Machine a try and see if I can’t restore to yesterdays state. I can swallow a days loss of mail but if I cant restore my inbox to its former state I’m going to seriously consider reverting to Tiger.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Chris Lamothe // Dec 13, 2007 at 10:59 am
I have SuperDuper! clone my MBPro’s HD every Friday night to a partition on an external USB drive. SuperDuper! also makes it bootable and OS X is great enough that you can boot off an external USB drive, so in the event of an HD failure on the notebook I can still boot with my environment exactly as it was within the past seven days. I don’t know how you’d feel about losing (up to) seven days of mail, but it’s pretty reassuring knowing I can undo things that easily. I must admit I use GMail for all my mail (perhaps you could add a rule to send a copy of all incoming mail to GMail, their search is fantastic) but I’m curious to hear how your time traveling works out.
2 pookzilla // Dec 13, 2007 at 9:44 pm
In the end I managed to import my old mailbox. My messages are no longer in my inbox but they’re still there and searchable at least…
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