Ok, so I got a phone call this morning from a friend. He was feeling frustrated because he could not send and receive email. He decided to delete his Apple Mail account and create a new one hoping that would solve his problem. To his horror he saw that his Inbox has been deleted as well. It didn’t occur to him that all of his messages would be lost as well. Panic ensues, text messages were sent, phone calls were made.

Luckily Christopher at AWP has posted a step by step procedure on how to recover deleted email as a result of deleting your account. It involves Data Rescue II, emlxconvert and an external hard drive. Looking through it the procedure doesn’t seem to be that complicated.

Check out how to do it here.

I like the version of Apple Mail that ships with Leopard. Don’t get me wrong. I love that it’s faster. I love that it has ‘todo’ integrated with it. I love the small improvements in the interface and the overall polish of the application. I love all of that.

I do have one gripe though.. So far.. When you receive an email with an attachment and you want to save it, the previous Apple Mail had the option for you to select where you want to save it. On every email. Now Apple Mail either saves it to your downloads folder or you can set a folder. But it will save to that folder every time.

So now every time I save an attachment, my workflow is extended. I save it to the downloads folder and them move it to the folder i want to file it to. That’s just not right. It’s tedious.

I wish they kept it the same way as they did before. Maybe there’s a way to do it like before and I just haven’t found it.

The good think though is quicklook. You can use quicklook to preview the attachments. That’s a good thing.

Now Apple if you can just fix this gripe of mine… Please…

*Edited

Thanks to Mark, David, Doug, and Anonymoose for pointing out how I can solve this problem. Turns out all I need to do is hold down the save as button until the option comes out. Why I didn’t think of that? Beats me… See even if you’re an experienced Mac user you can still learn something from people.

I’ve only installed Leopard recently on my personal computer so the computers with Leopard installed that I’ve used before, I didn’t play with Mail since I don’t download mail on other computers.

Again thanks guys.

Former The After Mac writer and current b5 Tech channel editor Jayvee Fernandez wrote about a problem that he was experiencing with an undeletable draft mail problem on Leopard’s Apple Mail. Apparently other people are also experiencing these problems.

Quoting from his blog:

The first is to simply highlight the email and click on the REBUILD option. The mail will disappear. If this still does not happen, you can check out this post of onkeljonas from Ars Technica that shows you how to do it:

Poking around ~/Library/Mail/ showed that while Mail still showed the 1 unread message, it didn’t actually exist – it turns out that Mail needs a file to delete to be able to properly update the messagecounts and lists, and for some reason a mail file had disappeared by itself.
Here is a fix:

1) Navigate to ~/Library/Mail/
2) Open BackupTOC.plist, and figure out which of the entries under Root/messages is the borked one
3) Look at the kMDItemPath and make a note of the last part (xxx.emlx)
4) Open Mail, make a new draft, quit Mail
5) Navigate to ~/Library/Mail/[account]/Drafts.mbox/Messages/, make a copy of the draft you just created (don’t just rename it, or you’ll have to redo the process). Make sure the copy is in the correct mbox (in my case that was Drafts, so I didn’t have to move it) and name the copy using the note from step 3.
6) Open Mail, delete the offending email, profit!

The real problem here is how a mailfile went missing in the first place, but I’ll attribute it to some rare Mail bug involving empty messages.

Head on to Jayvee’s blog to see the full entry, while you’re at it read through his other entries. They’re informative and entertaining.

The Pro Site of Apple features “Tips of the Week”, for this week it’s all about creating iCal events from Apple Mail. This tip is exclusive to Leopard users. So if you’re on Leopard already, read the useful tip from Apple.

Leopard is smart—smart enough to recognize dates within the text of an email in Apple Mail.

When your cursor hovers over a date in the body of an email, a dotted rectangle surrounds the date, and a small arrow appears. Hold on the arrow, and up pop two iCal options: Create New iCal Event and Show This Date in iCal.

Choosing Create New iCal Event generates a dialog box. Its default name is the subject line of the original email, though you can change it here. You can also specify the location and duration of the event and add additional notes. When you’re finished, choose Add to iCal. Leopard adds the date to your calendar—without even opening iCal.

Not sure if you’re available? Choose Show This Date in iCal. This opens iCal at the date in question, but doesn’t add the event to your schedule.

This tip can be originally found in the Apple Pro Site. The direct link to the tip here. This is Apple’s tip and I just reposted for convenience.

You might also want to sign-up for updates from Apple’s creative community.

Skype’s pretty much popular these days. It’s being used more and more for communicating with loved ones, friends and colleagues from all over. Well Skype is best used in conjunction with other communication tools such as email, instant messaging, etc. So it’s only logical that you’d want to add your Skype info on your email signature. Taking it a step further, it’d be nice to add a Skype Me button to your email signature. Someone can actually just click the Skype Me button and it would launch Skype and call you. Cool huh.

Well if you’re using Apple Mail there’s a tutorial on the Skype web site that shows you how to add a Skype Me button on your signature in Apple Mail. I’ve tried it and it works. Give it a go too!