MacMail - restoring mailboxes from Time Machine.

Let's say, that you are moving into the modern way of doing things - and want your mail collected by IMAP instead of POP. (Yes, I know ther are some of you who resist!)

A lot of customers are discovering that this is the way to go to avoid having to find their message amongst all the spam and flotsam on multiple devices... And more importantly see what was Sent in reply to that important email last week when you were in Honlulu and your partner replied on your behalf..

I accomplished this (on Mavericks on an iMac), but with a few provisos and heart-stopping moments.

The pop settings had been set to delete all mail on the server after a month, and there were two xtra accounts with history back about 3 years (2016 to 2013).

After checking the amount of mail left on the server and making sure I had the passwords correct (using webmail), I deleted the two accounts in Mail.

What I forgot to do was drag the contents into folders created under the On My Mac section.

I created the two new IMAP accounts (the trick here is to purposefully put a wrong password in - or else you will simply get a POP Yahoo account created).

So I resorted to Time Machine - which I knew had been backing up OK.

Two tricks I learned here - place your cursor in the Folder or Mailbox that you want to restore before pressing the Time Machine. Either restore an entire mailbox, or select individual mail within a box.

Allow all the items to load BEFORE pressing Command-A to select all though!

Then Restore and wait a good amount of time to allow the process to complete as there is no indication of its progress or success. In future I may open a terminal to see if there any encouraging logs coming through...


The most important trick is to close Mail, and re-open it, and you should see a new folder at the bottom of the list called Recovered Messages, and Recovered Messages-1 -2 -3 if you have tried it a few times like I did (These new folders not be visible if you have a lot of folders), and copy and paste the items back into the IMAP Inbox, (or perhaps just into an On My Mac folder if you prefer - in case the IMAP server deletes them as they are not on the server) - as reported in this excellent page here: http://pondini.org/TM/15m.html

Job done.

Moving from Outlook XP (2000) to Outlook 2010

Recently I installed Office2010 H&B (which includes Outlook) on a laptop that had been running Outlook2000Pro happliy for many years (are you listening MS?).

Dutifully I copied the folders where the PSTs reside - just in case.
I aslo exported iaf files for the two Email Accounts, and I made a copy of the wab.

All went well, I just needed the Email account password but everything else seemed to come across fine.
I just Opened an Outlook data file - rather than tried any tricky replacement of the new file it created. this way I could be sure any converting would happen a t that point.
Then old emails could be copied or moved over to the new clean uncluttered Inboxes.

So all went smoothly, you ask?

Not entirely, the Calendar was not copied across and no way could the old version of Outlook be loaded to open it.

Perhaps an export of the data or sync to some online service first may have been wise.
But the lease I should have done was PRINT off the next few weeks. Luckily there were only a handful of entries. But all the history was gone.

Live and learn.

Google Apps Sync supports only Outlook 2003 or greater

Take that.
Upgrade your client/s to 2003 from 2000 or 97 first...?

Outlook 2003 cannot open this email

This generic error has a host of possible causes and therefore suggested solutions.. the most tempting of which was to go "Open Source" ;) removing Add-ons, safe mode, repair install had no effect.
I even tried changing the default viewing and composing fonts. Desparate, eh?

However the fix was simply taming that terrible excuse for a program that is Macafee. Still, the customer has just made the mistake of shelling out online for it, so no chance of demanding a refund...

THE SOLUTION:
I disabled the parental control and safe surf components leaving the main antivirus bit running, and voila, I could once again see the body of emails without having to first reply in plain text! Grrr (Not sure which of the two components was the culprit, but I would suggest the surf part.. due to the attempt at web'ing everything back in 2003.) How well did that work out?!

Moving email and contacts from OE to Outlook

Moving from XP to Win7?

One of the tricky bits is getting email from Outlook Express to Outlook proper.
Copying the dbx files to the new pc is easy enough.
Then from WLM simply Import OE v6 Mail and Contacts (altogh the contacts don't come through).
An important step is to MOVE the imported mail from the Storage Folder called Imported Files into folders you have created in WLM. This takes time when there are a lot of folders containing large amounts of email.
Then from Outlook, you import mail and it detects the WLM store.

I don't bother exporting or importing the Mail Account settings, even when there is more then one. A few screengrabs of the various config screens copied across to the new PC are all that is required (along with the password/s). Make sure you look at all the screens, especially if the Outgoing "Logon Using" is ticked.

Contacts is almost as simple (when you know how:)

Copy the wab file to the new pc. Double click it, which will [somewhat presumptuously] import all the contacts into Windows Contacts folder.
Then from Outlook you can choose the Open > Import Messages & Contacts (choose contacts only) in the WLM format.. as described correctly here:
http://www.msoutlook.info/question/382
This process took longer to import than the messages, but may have been because Outlook was "preparing to Send and Receive"...

A tip therefore is to force all the Email clients to work offline, by either disconnecting from the network, setting the clients to Work Offline, or in my case, leaving the passwords blank until the work was done.

Sending photos by WindowsLive email is now near impossible... SOLUTION

It was a great leap forward once the ability to downsize any selection of photos directly from explorer was included in Windows (without having to find a separate down-sizer). Even Nanna and Poppa could do it..
XP and OE come to mind. They had their issues, but eventually were ironed out over the years.

Then came WLM
Windows Live Mail 2011 has caused a lot of users to tear their collective hair out trying to the simplest of things.. send a few down-sized photos as an email attachment...

The most succinct post (of many) describing the solution is:
http://www.winvistatips.com/re-sending-pictures-wlm11-t830132.html

In summary - WLM sends just a thumbnail of the images you want to send, and uploads the full high resolution image to the user's Skydrive - available to all Windows Live accounts. The recipient of the email can then view the "Slideshow" by clicking on a link to look at the online version of the full size images stored on Skydrive.
We all know NOT to click on links in emails....

The SOLUTION?

Right-click on the selected photos as usual, select send to mail recipient and re-size as wanted
Once it comes up as a photo e-mail – here's the trick - hit view slideshow in the e-mail window

A Photo album tools tab will now appear. Hit the format tab. Click on the paper-click (attachment) icon, and they will now be switched to attachments, at their re-sized resolutions

Here's the kicker:
You need to have a WindowsLive account setup and logged in once for this to work.
[caption id="attachment_378" align="alignright" width="575" caption="Click on the paperclip once you have logged in to WL to attach photos the old fashioned way :)"][/caption]
To use the plain WindowsLive email program, no Windows Live account is needed, but without signing up to yet another service, sending photos becomes near impossible - to the point of completely jamming up the outbox - with an error that requires you to delete the "Email Photo and try again"!

Grrr..