Betalogue

I have a sequence of actions in Mail 2.0 that can pretty reliably make messages disappear for good. It doesn’t move them to the Trash. It makes them disappear completely. This is bad.

Try the following… Make sure you have a mailbox called “XXXX” (whatever) in your list of mailboxes. Then send yourself a message with the subject line “Disappeared!”. Once you’ve received the message in your Inbox, do the following three actions in rapid succession:

1. Drag the “Disappeared!” message from the Inbox to mailbox XXXX in the list of mailboxes to move it there.
2. Immediately after releasing the mouse button, click on mailbox A to view its contents.
3. Immediately after clicking on mailbox A, press command-Z on the keyboard.

You have to do these three actions in this exact order, and you have to do them really quickly. If you do, I am pretty sure you’ll achieve the desired effect: the “Disappeared!” message will have disappeared for good.

It won’t be in mailbox XXXX. It won’t be in your Inbox. It won’t be in the Trash. It will be gone. For good. Rebuilding your mailboxes’ indexes won’t help. Searching for a message with the subject line “Disappeared!” with Spotlight will return nothing. The message is toast.

Needless to say, I have only encountered this because I have actually managed to do this accidentally myself and lose a message entirely!

This is pretty bad.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, June 9th, 2005 at 4:55 am and is filed under Mail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.