Hi Gordon, From the "Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion" section on "Back Up and Restore Your Email", you can use any backup program to restore your email, provided it backs up: • ~/Library/Mail: This folder contains all your mailboxes, rules, RSS feeds, junk mail settings and most of the other data Mail uses. • ~/Library/Keychains: This folder contains all your keychains, which store your user names and passwords. • ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook: This folder contains your Address Book contacts and your Previous Recipients list. • ~/Library/Preferences: This folder contains your preference files, among which is the one Mail uses.
I think the ~/Library/Keychains folder is needed to supply the mail account logins for the various smtp servers that you use. Under ~/Library/Preferences the obvious plist folder that you need is com.apple.mail.plist, but I don't know whether there are any others. What I do is periodically (about every month to 6 weeks or so) go to my ~/Library/Preferences folder in list view mode (Command-2), which I believe by default is sorted according to Date Modified. If this is not the case, just navigate to the "Date Modified" column and use the sort shortcut (VO-Shift-Backslash on an English language keyboard). Then I just select and copy the top 50 or so files and copy them to a folder on my Desktop. This gives me a quick way to restore old plist files without having to go to Time Machine or cloned backup. Because the plist files are small, I can easily keep a few sets of these on my Desktop -- you could take the top 100 if you run a lot of software. Since the most common general problem, apart from having to repair permissions with Disk Utility, is having a corrupted plist file, this gives me an easy way to move or delete a problem plist file when an application isn't working as expected, and substitute one from when things were working. Since the probability that any plist file goes up, the more times an app is used, since preferences in the plist file get re-written each time an application is opened or closed, copying the 50 or so most recently modified preference files will usually give me the ones I need to replace, without my having to remember/know which ones are associated with which applications. For more information on plist files and how they're named, list members can read at my old archived post: • Re: deleting a hotkey from YoruFukurou > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg12362.html Gordon certainly doesn't need to read that. I agree with Lynne that you should enjoy your new 13" MacBook Air, however you got it. HTH. Cheers, Esther On 11 Apr 2013, at 12:10, Gordon Smith wrote: > Hi all > > OK, after a very traumatic couple of days with computers dying as a result of > what I now know to be a very ugly incompatibility between Mountain Lion and a > piece of software, (more on that shortly), I now need to know a couple of > things regarding copying Mail the easy way between machines. I have copied > /Users/Gordon/Library/Mail, /Users/Gordon/Library/Application Support over > from one machine to the other, in the hope that I can get Mail to work as was > without having to go through the pain barrier again. So, could somebody > please tell me which other files/directories need to be copied or transferred > in order to make Mail come up seamlessly when I execute the application? For > example, is there anything in ~/Library/Preferences or > ~/Library/PrefercePanes which needs to be included in the en-block dump in > order to have Mail believe that it's running on the same configuration? > > Now, to the ugly piece of software. I recently installed Paragon Software > "Volume Snapshot" in the hope that I might get a Rollback-like configuration. > That, I am sorry to say, was a massive mistake! Not only did the software > screw things up so badly that the machine just sits there at power-on > displaying the Apple Logo forever and a day, but there's no way to force the > machine to restart at all. Not only that, but in my haste I concluded that > the motherboard had died because the USB ports would not power up at all. > Again, a huge mistake. Lynne and I went over to our new local Apple Store, > and we purchased another Mac for me which was intended to be a replacement > for what we thought was the dead MacBook Pro. > > I love the design of the new MacBook Air. Lynne said that I deserve the best > and so she bought me a 13-inch 256GB MacBook Air. Shame it only has 4GB of > RAM but I am sure we can do something about that. Anyway, to the point. > When I got home I thought that out of desperation, I would try plugging in a > firewire lead between what I bbelieved to be the dead MacBook Pro and the new > machine. I had the foresight to also buy a Thunderbolt to FireWire 2 > adapter. To our utter astonishment, when I tried to boot the MacBook Pro > into Terminal mode, it came up right away on the new machine's volume list. > At this point my heart sank. I had just inadvertently caused Lynne to agree > to fork out over £1200.00 for the new machine and adapter. It wasn't > necessary. Further, unless the macines are faulty you cannot return them > once opened and registered because they cannot be re-sold once the software > license for that machine is soiled. > > Again, to my amazement, when I confessed my error to Lynne, all she said to > me was "Never mind sweetheart, just enjoy using it. Im sure we'll find a > good use for the old machine." > > OK, so I tried migrating my settings over to the new machine and, when it > came to restart time, the machine just sat there displaying the Apple logo, > just like the MacBook Pro. > > So I had to go through the headache of reinstalling that machine as well, > using Wifi networking. So now, anyway, I'm trying to make the transition as > painless as possible. So, I am hunting around for the Paragon preference > files so that I can try to remove them in the hope that the Pro will start up > properly. > > Any help much appreciated. Please don't anybody make that mistake. I > believed the board had died because the USB ports weren't getting any power. > But now I understand why, the machine just couldn't see the hard drive at all. > <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> As the Mac Access Dot Net administrators, we do our very best to ensure that the Mac-Access E-Mal list remains malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free. However, this should in no way replace your own security strategy. We assume neither liability nor responsibility should something unpredictable happen. 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