Time Machine oddities with Mail

[jasimon9]

I am just getting started with the Mac. I have discovered some "oddities" in recovering Mail with IMAP mailboxes.

I had lost some mailboxes. Unfortunately this had happened while I was reorganizing the mailbox structure. Consequently, the top-level mailbox names had all been changed. The method of navigating back in time provided by Time Machine did not allow me to directly find any backup sets.

Specifically, since the mailbox was not there to start from, there was no way to "regress" it back. Fortunately I discovered that I could regress using the Trash mailbox. Without this method of back-tracking, I would have been SOL.

Another anomaly seems to be that a mailbox with subfolders can sometimes be recovered in one operation. However, sometimes some of the sub-folders are not restored.

1. Would this "regress via Trash folders" be the standard procedure in such a case? If so, is it well-known?

2. Why do sub-folders sometimes get omitted from the restoration?

 

[JediMeister]

Changes to IMAP accounts are applied directly to the server, Time Machine can only resolve local issues for POP accounts or on the computer itself. Not sure why it allowed you to revert certain mailboxes and not others though. Were some Smart Mailboxes by chance?

 

[jasimon9]

Changes to IMAP accounts are applied directly to the server, Time Machine can only resolve local issues for POP accounts or on the computer itself. Not sure why it allowed you to revert certain mailboxes and not others though. Were some Smart Mailboxes by chance?

More detail: using IMAP, but the mailbox files are "mirrored" on the local machine. That is what I am recovering. So I am recovering the mail just fine (one mailbox at a time).

They were not smart mailboxes. Odd because sometimes it would bring back all subfolders, one time two out of three, and most times just the first sub-folder. Feels to me like a bug.

 

[jasimon9]

Other Mail bugs

I have also noticed what apppears to be another Mail bug: when copying folders that have subfolders, the Mail Activity pane displays the activity for the first subfolder. But for the remaining ones, nothing is shown.

But you can follow the progress by highlighting the destination folder, and at the top you will see the message count increasing as the folder is populated.