Mail Clients for Mac

Hi,

There have been several discussions here on this topic. But I am asking for your input on a specific requirement. Future proofing my email.

Before switching to Mac I had been a long time Outlook user. What I loved about Outlook was that since the late 90's I could port my email archive forward to each subsequent version with no loss of either content or structure.

When I switched to Mac I initially used the built in Mail application. I also tried Airmail and have thought of using the Outlook client.

Eventually I settled on the built in Mail app as it did everything I needed with my current crop of email addresses including iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and my ISP's pop mail.

However recently I had a drive failure and decided to reinstall my Mac from scratch as opposed to from my TimeMachine backups. I had hoped from some perusing of the net that I could restore my email from my recent backup.

Alas that does not appear to be possible, at least not JUST my email. It appears that I would have to restore a sizable chunk of my backup in order just to retrieve my email.

So in order to avoid this issue in the future I am considering going back to Outlook as the email store is a single file, easily backed up and restored.

This is where you dear readers come in! Any thoughts, suggestions, warnings?

Thanks in advance for your time and input.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

Restoring your email using Time Machine is not as difficult as you make it out to be, nor is it a large restore. However, there's definitely a certain method that has to be used:

Open Mac Mail and leave it open, now enter Time Machine and choose a date to restore from. Time Machine will sense the Mail program is running and will open the Mail backup. Just select restore and respond to where you wish the restore to be directed to. Naturally you'll want to restore to the original folders.

TimeMachine Did Not Work

Hi,

Thanks for the advice however TimeMachine did not work as you suggested. I can see the backups on the right by date, however the Restore button never becomes active. I can restore the entire computer which is not what I wanted to do.

I had a friend look over my shoulder when I tried to restore just mail as you suggested and he agreed that "something is hosed" with TimeMachine. On his computer it worked as you suggested however not on mine.

Hence back to my original issue of an email client that is easier to back up and restore independently of TimeMachine.

On another note Apple Support forums are chock full of issues surrounding Time Machine so I am also now looking for an alternative backup solution.

As for an alternative for Time Machine, I'd strongly suggest you just use CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) or maybe SD (SuperDuper!), both of which can provide a scheduled backup(s) and can provide a bootable clone backup.

Both provide cloned backup files/folders that can be accessed with the Finder, just the same way as on your Mac.

CCC Backup

Hi,

I actually already own a copy of CCC from when I moved my hard disk to an SSD, and totally forgot it also did backups!

Thank you for the reminder! I have just finished setting it up and it is running the first backup now!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

Wow!! Not the best thing to have CCC installed but not running or being used I'd say. But glad you found it and I trust you'll keep using it. Your useful backup data will thank you.

I had a friend look over my shoulder when I tried to restore just mail as you suggested and he agreed that "something is hosed" with TimeMachine. On his computer it worked as you suggested however not on mine.

Click to expand...

Something is probably corrupt with your Time Machine backup, however, now that you have CCC running, it might be a good time to wipe your Time Machine external hard drive and start over. Once Time Machine begins to misbehave it becomes very unreliable and there is nothing more frustrating than a backup which will not restore when you need it.