UPDATE (25 August 2010): Please note that this post is well over 2 years old and as Tim pointed out in the comments below, this method may not be the best solution for restoring emails. According to his restore efforts, changes where made to the timestamp from the date in which they were received to the date in which they were restored. I have not tested this myself.
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The hard drive on my PowerBook completely died the other day, but I luckily had been running Time Machine backups since upgrading to Leopard. (I wasn’t all that pissed off seeing as I was eager for an excuse to replace my wimpy 40Gb hard drive with a new 160Gb drive). I fumbled a bit, looking for a specific Apple Mail restore tool. I knew where all my emails lived, but I thought that Apple would have a specific means for restoring apps like Mail. So I created this mini-tutorial on how to restore Apple Mail from Time Machine simply because I could not find this method elsewhere.

Supposedly, If you attach your Time Machine backup drive, open Apple Mail then launch the Time Machine application, you are presented with historical views of Apple Mail. This did not work for me, the historical views were just blank, so the steps below do not take this approach.

Restoring Your Emails from a Time Machine Backup

Warning: If you have already setup Apple Mail with your accounts and preferences, this will negate ALL your doings.

Note: This process will restore all your email accounts, preferences, passwords, smart mailboxes, etc.

The How-To

1. Before loading Time Machine, open the Finder and navigate to Home Folder (username) -> Library. In there will be a folder name “Mail”. Rename it to “Mail (default)” (Select the folder then hit the Return key to rename).
2. Mount your Time Machine Backup Drive (ahem, plug it in).
3. Control + Click the Time Machine Application and chose “Browse Other Time Machine disks…”. This, of course, brings up the historical view of your backups.
4. Go back to your most recent backup (2nd window back) and navigate to Home Folder (username) -> Library. Select the “Mail” folder and click the restore button (bottom right).
5. Once the restore is completed, open Apple Mail and you will be presented with an import wizard (below). Simply follow through the prompts and you will be good to go.

That’s it!

UPDATE (20-January-2009): After step 4., also restore ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

Thanks Jon C.

If you have multiple mail accounts, you should also restore the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist file as well. This will ensure all of your account settings are imported. – Jon C.

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I just couldn’t resist posting this one…

Derren Brown is a fantastic British psychological illusionist and entertainer. He uses a technique know as Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, that gives him the ability to convince people to do anything he wants them to do.

In this video Derren convinces tellers at a dog track in the UK that he has a winning ticket when really he his dog came dead last. Brilliant stuff!

I don’t have cable service so XBox and now iTunes movie rentals should make perfect sense for me. I hate going to blockbuster and sometimes I can’t wait for my next Nexflix movie to arrive. But it’s still difficult to rent movies on my terms.

I have two problems with online rentals.

1. The rental process is not pain free. If you are using iTunes, how do you get the movie onto your tv? Can I watch it on another computer on my network? What does this offer over pay-per-view? What is really annoying is that you have to wait for movies to fully download before watching them – Average download time for me is 3 hours, something that will be solved in terms of future bandwidth speeds. Fred Wilson had a great idea for texting in movie rentals to iTunes. The movie would then begin downloading on your computer at home, ready for you watch when you got home.

2. $3-4 per movie. Come on, if RedBox can do it for 99 cents, surely Microsoft and Apple could at least match that. I was thinking a buck, Seth Godin suggests 50 cents. Why not just grab the movie I want from bittorrent? Either way $3-4 is way to high for something that can and will scale. Set Godin makes a great point about finding the right price (50 cents):

All desire for piracy goes out the window, replaced by convenience, ease of use and a clear conscience.

Exactly.

I just hope these issues will be solved with realistic solutions as suing your potential customers is not the route to take.

Ah, peace-loving, vegan hippos hanging with carnivorous, blood-lusting crocodiles. They get along so easily. Why can’t we?

Harmonius Hippos and Crocs

Food is precious. Life is precious. So I applaud Jamie Oliver’s recent televised “gala dinner” where he slaughtered a chicken in front of his guests “to awaken British consumers to the high costs of cheap chicken” (nytimes article). Food should be respected and we need to be more connected to it.

The standards for food, living animals that we consume, is appalling. How cheap do we need our food to be? Really!?! There is a point where food no longer is food. I often come across foods I can’t even identify.

I’d love to walk into Dominicks (grocery chain here in Chicago) one day and see the enormous 20ft x 4ft freezers, overflowing with frozen chickens, pre-seasoned pork, unidentifiable meats, removed. Who is eating all this stuff anyway? The food industry is set up to burn through an animals life cycle as fast as possible.

Forget for the animals sake, be selfish, think of the health factors. How many processes do we want our food to go through before it gets to our table? If we do not respect our food, we will continue our endless battles against preventable diseases.

Don’t get me started on Trader Joes…

We all have opinions about things we are passionate about and I am no different. So here is my quick take on Apple’s new member to the MacBook line. The MacBook Air. (First Look at the MacBook Air)

Absolutely Gorgeous
Yes. It is gorgeous and super thin and light. Ok. I love the black keys and surprisingly the slight clam like curvature to the body’s edges is nice too. It just looks cool.

Wow.

Wizard.

Meh, But So What
I truly expected something more from Apple. A new approach to mobile computing all together, apart from simply being the thinnest computer. Thin is just not enough for me. It’s been done and playing the thinner game is boring to me.

It comes off as a necessary step in a revolutionary process. Somehow without it we could never move on. Nah! I say skip generations! Move faster than you need or even should! Why not? Don’t take the easy, obvious way out. Taking away drives, being purely a wireless device does not count. It barely begins to scratch the surface of what computing will become.

So Do I Want One?
Fuck Ya!

No more lugging around my 15″ PowerBook G5!

Room in my bag for more useless junk!

Trackpad gestures so I can get more done, faster!

Envious stares at the hippest Cafes!

Bromide and PVR free!

Glass is free of any mercury and arsenic!

$1800.00…Come on… That’s priced pretty well!

Gulp! Aaaaaaa!

People in Order is a short film by Lenka Clayton and James Price that chronologically follows 100 people banging a drum. From 1 to 100.

People in Order’s Age is part of a series of short films that assembles the people of Britain in a given order. In just 3 minutes, we meet 100 different people who are arranged according to their age, starting from age 1 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUHLa1qSy24

Kat and I went down to the south loop for a little long eared owl watching, which was amazing. It was about a month ago that (approx.) ten long eared owls took up residence in a small park in the Chicago’s South Loop.

Rare indeed. From what I gather Owls tend to be private and even a bit “secretive” and usually nest in rural areas where rodents are more prominent. Kat made a good observation about the way garbage is collected in the homes neighboring the park. Not from an alley, but from the front lawns surrounding the park. Hmm… City rats?

There was a small group of people gathered around, the location has been kept secret for awhile, but we checked around a few of the local birding sights and quickly found the spot. The best part was that people who had brought their binoculars were eager to share. Close up these creatures are absolutely gorgeous. I don’t know how else to put it. Just amazing!