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.

Connect Google Docs to a MySQL Server

Needed some quick and dirty reports from a MySQL Server based website to a User that used Google docs.

Found this
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/jdbc#reading_from_a_database

Open a Google spreadsheet click Tools->Script Manager create a new script and paste. Change host, instance (Schema), user and password and put some SQL in and you are done Googles end. Then you need to enable your server to let in Googles servers. There may be a more secure way than this using netmasks but this worked for me.

Create users with ip ranges of Googles servers to keep out the nasties.



When you run foo it copies data into the root of the spreadsheet.

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.

IE10 breaks RWW

Guess what? A recent update of IE from 9 to 10 stops Remote Web Workplace from working!
One solution is to click the compatibility mode button and thus lets you connect.
However, my rww opened with scroll bars bottom and right - so I assumed it was not a 100% fix.

(I had forgotten to run IE at 100% zoom - as any other zoom will cause the remote page to load with scroll bars - even when set to Full Screen).

So I UNinstalled the IE10 update (Hint: Use the Search box on the Installed Updates to quickly find the "Internet Explorer 10" update.)
Voila.
Here's a picture of the cause and the effect ;)

Oh, and you may need to HIDE the IE10 update form Windows Updates or else it will rise like a Phoenix to haunt you!

(This screenshot shows the AutoUpdate of IE10 and later Unticked..but it was ticked by defaulkt when I first encountered it)

Google Apps Sync supports only Outlook 2003 or greater

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

Reissue a certificate on SBS2008

Every few years the self-issued certificate that allows remote access to the remote web workplace expires, and needs to be reissued.
Here is an illustrated guide of the steps which I completed successfully:

From the SBS console, there were errors reported - followed my nose till I got this;







Ignore the configure modem - you do not want to be changing this
(I should have unticked all but the certificate - but there's only one way to find out!)


Nothing went wrong.

Check the date and time to make sure they are the fresh ones.

Your next challenge is to get them to the client PCs. RDP direct to the server and copy the file if you can. Zip the folder, rename it as a .txt and attache to a gmail? Or get out your sneakers and usb thumbdrive :)

Ah - I remember know how I started the process:
(See also the useful url on the screenshot)
And if adding a third party (purchased) certificate then I suppose you would use the link above the one highlighted?

Steps to get RWW working

The first time you run a RWW site that needs the Activex you should get prompted



Then you right click the yellow area to accept the diag



Then you'll get the login, BUT NOTE THE RED CERTIFICATE ERROR in all the above screens so far!



This means you need to run the InstallCertificate app from the folder where the certificate is that you issued from your SBS2008 server and copied to the local PC:



(Note - you may have needed to reissue the certificate on the server - see this post )

Now you can finally connect to the local PC including mapping local printers and clipboard. Note the address bar is no longer red..

Job done. :D