Hi, I just wanted to share with you that I actually recovered a mail item which I had written in Thunderbird for Windows with Time Machine. Yes, Apple’s Time Machine.
At work, we use Windows XP machines. Because I hate to wait 4 weeks for my mail program to load, I use Thunderbird. When I’m on the road, I ocasionally use webmail access, so I have Thunderbird setup so that it connects to the mailserver using IMAP. By doing this, my mail is always on the mail server.
Last week I saved a Draft mail containing some bugs in an application. My intention was to update this mail all week with new bugs, and send it out by the end of the week so that the reciever had a neat little list. By the end of the week however, I noticed that my Drafts folder was containing all kinds of old mail, and I decided to clean it out by “Crtl-A” – “Delete”. I went home with an empty Drafts folder, not realizing I had also deleted the Draft mail with the list of bugs.
By Sunday, I decided to send out the mail with the list of Bugs, and before I touched a computer it had hit me: I had deleted all my drafts! I sat down behind my trusty Mac Mini, settled on re-typing the whole list, but then I had a brilliant idea. My Apple runs Leopard, and the Mail program also connects through IMAP to the mailserver at work. So without me noticing, Mail.app had been fetching my mail all week, and Time Machine had been making backups all week. So I navigated to the “Drafts” folder, pressed the Time Machine icon, and 2 simple mouseclicks later I had found and restored that email I deleted.
I sent it out and needless to say I am a very happy camper. Today was a bit less succesful, I forgot to sleep my Apple so Mail.app was periodically fetching my mail. At work, Thunderbird disconnects when that happens so I was constantly re-connecting while reading and writing mail. Oh well, at least everything is backed up 🙂
Hmmm, that’s an odd server implementation you’ve got at work there. I’ve set up many computers simultaneously sharing the same IMAP account, without any client disconnecting when another client connects — even for IMAP-enabled (yet still evil, no discussion about that…) Microsoft Exchange servers!
(all right, so how did dot dot bracket get to be a smiley above…)
WordPress is doing that automatically. Normally I like that, but for dot-dot-bracket combinations it’s a bit silly, I agree.