The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

We’ve had reports of some issues from a variety of customers regarding Apple OS X Mail. The issue seems to cause sent messages to occasionally end up in the Drafts folder, and appear as though they have not been sent, though they have. I have done some research to try and find a solution to this, but so far have been unsuccessful. I have noticed in my research, however, that people from all over the Apple community are experiencing the exact same issue with all kinds of different mail services, including Apple’s .Mac Mail. Evidence suggests that this is an existing bug with Mail.app.
Here are some examples:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8300945231/m/
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-57000.html
http://forum.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=600

There are many ways to lose important data, and not just on your computer (where did I put my keys?). While it is almost always unexpected, and we as computer-users are often unprepared - occasionally data-loss occurs in ways that make you sit back and consider the infinite.

Recently at the OnDeckTech 24×7 help desk, I received a call from a customer who was upset, suspecting she had just potentially lost a TON of very valuable data. A video editor here in Chicago, she has a 15″ Powerbook with an 80GB HD, two Maxtor 300GB External Drives, and one 160GB LaCie Porsche drive. ALL of which fell victim to one of the most bizarre disasters I have encountered.

This past week we had a prospective customer putting one of our Zimbra hosting services through the wringer, testing e-mail, calendar and contact synchronization. He noticed when moving e-mail from his inbox to a subdirectory (aka directory or folder), he duplicated e-mail instead of the expected process of “moving” e-mail: copying and deleting.

We traced this anomaly to his testing environment: he had both the Zimbra web interface open and Mail.app. We suspected because they are both active IMAP clients attempting to synchronize their data with the server, organizational changes made in one while the other is also operating may lead to the unintended duplication of some e-mail.

My friend Joe came to our office today, he’s been trying to use Yahoo Messenger on his 12″ PowerBook to communicate with his friend in Italy, on her Windows system.

Here’s a tutorial he’s going to try, let us know how it goes:

http://www.mvldesign.com/video_conference_tutorial.html

Thanks to Rod who e-mailed us with a question tonight from his .Mac account.

“Is there anti spyware for Mac’s availble? I have a 1.67GHz G4 17″Powerbook. The firewall in the Mac OS X 10.4.6 is turned on. Any other suggestions for mac security would be appreciated. ”

While anti-spyware isn’t yet needed for your Mac, there’s plenty you can do to secure your Mac. To start, if you’re using Apple Mail, and have a $99/year .Mac account like Rod, securing your e-mail from potential prying eyes at public wireless access points, and elsewhere, is fairly straight-forward.