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Thursday night I set-up SpamSieve on a secondary, always-running computer so as to filter out spam from email when using the iPhone. I ended-up accidentally deleting all of the mail in my inbox which includes about 5 different accounts (mobile me, gmail, personal domains)
It took a few minutes before realizing my error. I looked to a 3 week old clone back-up as a way of possibly restoring the messages I had lost. I could see that these messages were still in the imapmbox in the Mail folder under the Library user folder. So I thought that I could just replace the current one with this one and it would give me an opportunity to recover.
Needless to say I was running in panic mode and didn't think to do several things like a. find another way to import the messages (Mail Import would not work on Imap inboxes!) b. turn of internet connection.
As a result this plan didn't work and more importantly it was doing something that I don't quite understand why but understand that it somehow deleted every new message that was coming in at that point. I didn't realize this was happening until about 5 hours later. So for 5 hours all my mail was going into the ether.
It turned out that I had to shut down Mail not only on the computers but also on the iPhone in order to remedy the problem. Somewhere along the line something was "corrupting" the IMAP server and any client accessing the server was causing problems.
It was a long night and it ended with starting over locally on all three devices. Importing mail from old time machine back ups and discovering that I only lost about a weeks worth of messages. No real big deal as a mass email to important people went out asking to resend anything pertinent that might have gotten lost.
I did discover EMLX Convert, which converts emlx messages, ie IMAP mailbox messages, to MBOX type messages which then means you can import them into mail (something that I couldn't do before and led me on the disaster road I chose.
I assume that the problem I had with IMAP was that I was presenting this old archive as how the mail should look and the discrepancy was too much and caused a problem.
A more upto date Time Machine backup would have helped too.
C'est la vie
It took a few minutes before realizing my error. I looked to a 3 week old clone back-up as a way of possibly restoring the messages I had lost. I could see that these messages were still in the imapmbox in the Mail folder under the Library user folder. So I thought that I could just replace the current one with this one and it would give me an opportunity to recover.
Needless to say I was running in panic mode and didn't think to do several things like a. find another way to import the messages (Mail Import would not work on Imap inboxes!) b. turn of internet connection.
As a result this plan didn't work and more importantly it was doing something that I don't quite understand why but understand that it somehow deleted every new message that was coming in at that point. I didn't realize this was happening until about 5 hours later. So for 5 hours all my mail was going into the ether.
It turned out that I had to shut down Mail not only on the computers but also on the iPhone in order to remedy the problem. Somewhere along the line something was "corrupting" the IMAP server and any client accessing the server was causing problems.
It was a long night and it ended with starting over locally on all three devices. Importing mail from old time machine back ups and discovering that I only lost about a weeks worth of messages. No real big deal as a mass email to important people went out asking to resend anything pertinent that might have gotten lost.
I did discover EMLX Convert, which converts emlx messages, ie IMAP mailbox messages, to MBOX type messages which then means you can import them into mail (something that I couldn't do before and led me on the disaster road I chose.
I assume that the problem I had with IMAP was that I was presenting this old archive as how the mail should look and the discrepancy was too much and caused a problem.
A more upto date Time Machine backup would have helped too.
C'est la vie
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Los Angeles
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Re: D'oh or How NOT to Restore Deleted Mail In An iMap Account
Sat, November 7, 2009 - 6:02 PMC'est sé bon , Pink •
We've all done stuƒƒ like that B 4 . eXtensible Markup Language is my personal bug-a-boo .X M L
( Microsloth's reverse engineered hack H T M L that iTunes® uses for data base creation and retention . i simply h a t e it like death
Join the club :)
∞
www.ifixit.com
