The Apple Beat: The Cloud saves the day

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

I decided to set-up my ThinkPad X41 (last one IBM made) to take on a trip and decided to download the Thunderbird mail application to be able to access my .Me mail. I didn't read the instructions and the next thing I knew, my entire Inbox had disappeared.

There's nothing quite like the metallic taste of stark panic when one realizes that 4,000 e-mail messages, including invoices, endearing jokes and countless story references are completely gone. There must be an easier, happier way to that zero-inbox but this ain't it.

It seems that Thunderbird uses the IMAP mail protocol  by default instead of the more .Me compatible POP Mail. This and my neglecting to ensure that "copies are left on the server," resulted in getting my Inbox wiped on the server once the mail transferred to the Thunderbird client.

I foolishly installed Thunderbird it hoping for a different Windows XP mail client than Outlook Express but this ended up backfiring, big time. I found out later on that Thunderbird is not supported or suggested as a front end for MobileMe mail, who knew?

Little did I know that the hour it took to download my inbox into Thunderbird, it was also emptying the server so when I accessed mail via the MobileMe Mail website everything was gone!

This realization was compounded by my checking my MacBook Air's Mail app to discover that the Inbox had been purged there too! I was starting to feel ill. My computers, phones and tablet are all set to sync with the server so push notifications and updates are pretty constant.

I thought I was pretty much done for. After all, while I still had most of my mail (downloaded on Thunderbird) all the folders and the additional information on priority and classification of all those messages, days worth of work, were all gone.

I decided my only recourse was to get in touch with Apple and see if I could dump-back all my mail on to the server. I realized this was highly irregular and likely impossible but I was trusting that they would have an answer. I braced myself for an afternoon 'on hold' listening to Ke$ha's Tik-Tok on rotation while getting bounced from voice to voice as I re-enacted all the dumbass things I did to get me into this fix.

Fortunately, instead of calling, I used the chat client on Apple's support website and within minutes was being assisted by a live person. Wow, I thought. This really works.

To cut a long story short, Apple was able to recover all my mail from a recent backup. They we're able to get everything to where it was before the brain fart. Credit it to their massive server farm, Time Machine backups or just the sheer power of the upcoming iCloud but they restored in 10 minutes what would have taken me a week to do manually and I was able to get help using their chat client.

The service assistant was also very calm and reassuring throughout this experience and seemed knowledgeable enough to tell me what Windows XP clients are compatible and how I should proceed (I just decided to stick to the webmail). This one incident alone was worth the price of admission to .Me because I doubt I'd have gotten a quick (If any) resolution from just a mail hosting company.

I'm not sure what will happen to .Me email once iCloud is launched but I really hope they will continue to support it. As for me, I've learned my lesson.To have  frequent backups and do more research before installing an new application, specially one that deals with critical data such as email.