MacBook Pro, week 2: Mail

Oh goodness. The Mail client is a comedy of errors tonight.

So, OS X comes with a mail client. I set it up a week or so ago to connect to my Hotmail account. All seemed well.

Later, I noticed that all my emails were gone from the Hotmail server. I wasn't really surprised. It was clear when I was setting up the account that it was going to use POP, and the default behavior for POP is usually to remove messages from the server after they're downloaded. Now, that's not something that the average user might know, and so it would have been nice for Mail to warn me that that was going to happen… but whatever.

Now, my Hotmail has 20,000+ messages, dating back to the early 2000s. Obviously, I really don't need all of them, but I'd rather not completely lose them, either. Just in case. Since the MacBook needs to go back soon, and since my youngest was taking a while to settle down for bed, I decided to work on getting all that email back somewhere that I can get at it.

First, I found the option to leave mail on the server. Turns out the default setting is to leave mail on the server for 7 days and then delete it, which is why everything seemed fine at first and then suddenly my mail disappeared. Anyway, easy enough to turn that off.

Then I did some searching for how to put downloaded mail back on the server. Some of the sites I found suggested setting up a second Hotmail account and copying the messages to that. I tried doing that, but Mail wouldn't let me set up a second account with the same username. So I temporarily changed the username from my original account and added the second account.

I thought I'd be able to use IMAP or Exchange ActiveSync or something that would let me sync mail, not just download, but no luck: Hotmail doesn't support IMAP, and for some reason, ActiveSync is only supported from iOS, not OS X. Oh well. In Apple's defense, I'm sure the Hotmail team doesn't have a ton of motivation to make sure Hotmail works well from OS X mail clients :)

I decided to go back and try copying mail from my Hotmail account to my also-configured GMail account. When I switched back to Mail, it had up some screen with my Hotmail account information. I wasn't sure why, so I hit cancel to cancel any changes I might have made.

And my Hotmail account was gone. Poof. 20,000+ emails… gone.

I have no idea what I did.

I started searching for where Mail stores its files, in hopes that all the email was still stored on disk somewhere and just not visible in Mail. Everything I found kept referring to the Mail folder under my Library folder. But I couldn't find any sign of a Library folder.

Finally, I found this link: http://www.macgurulounge.com/library-folder-mac-os-lion. Which explained that this "pretty important folder" (their words) was no longer visible default on OS X Lion. It went on to explain that I could see a link  to the Library folder by holding down the Option key while clicking the Go menu. Or I could make it appear permanently by issuing the highly intuitive "chflags nohidden ~/Library" command.

Okay.

I was able to find my mail files, and they appeared to have all my messages in them, so I copied them to the Desktop for safe keeping while I recreated my Hotmail account. Good thing, as when I recreated my Hotmail account, all of the old email got overwritten. But I was able to import my backup copy into Mail, and get all my messages back.

Now I have to figure out how to copy all of those messages back into my Hotmail account… but that can wait till tomorrow.

Really, this is typical of my whole experience with the MacBook. There are some things that are quite elegant, without a doubt easier/better than on my PC. Other things are complicated and unintuitive. I definitely don't hate the MacBook; it's perfectly usable, and I'm sure if I spent more time with it (and especially if I didn't have to switch back to my PC for work), it would become more natural to me. But I don't feel like it's "OMG, SOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better!"