The Urge to Tinker and The Domino Effect of IT Problems

Ever had one of those weekends when just about everything related to your home office that could go wrong does, and as a result of trying to fix the issues you end up causing more harm than good?

If your response was "no", then either you are very lucky, exceptionally skilled and methodical, or just plain fibbing!


I recently had the IT weekend from hell. It started on Friday when I realised that Mail wasn’t saving a new Smart Mailbox that I’d created. It got worse on Saturday when I couldn’t get internet access, and on Sunday evening when I lost my entire network I was ready to give it all up and start knitting for a living. In each of these three cases it turned out that the initial problem was not of my doing, but my actions compounded the problems, leading to a domino effect of perceived problems, which I then tried to address causing a vicious circle of IT cock-ups.

Let’s time shift back to Friday. I use Smart Mailboxes a lot. Despite some of my past whinges about Apple Mail, Smart Mailboxes are a simply brilliant and how I’ve missed them in having had to use Outlook for Windows for the last couple of months. On Friday I set up a new Smart Mailbox to manage all the email for my current contract. It only had three conditions so nothing too complex - but I noticed that when I quit mail the new mailbox was missing. This was repeatable behaviour so needed investigating.

There was some indication on the Internet oracle that it was a permissions issue. And since the Smart Mailbox plists in the Mail folder didn’t appear to be getting updated this seemed plausible. However, my Mail is stored on my SD Card (see Bulk Out Your MBA Storage) and the repair permissions button on DiskUtility is greyed out. So, I stopped worrying about my Smart Mailboxes problem and focus on trying to fix the permissions on my SD card. This involved all sorts of shenanigans (including buying a USB card reader) which I won’t go into now, but I couldn’t resolve the problem, and I was beginning to think this wasn’t the cause of my Smart Mailbox problem. But that was now going to have to wait until Saturday as it was time to travel back home for the weekend.

We were up bright and early on Saturday morning and I was all psyched for a couple of hours of troubleshooting with the full benefits of fast home broadband (as opposed to the mobile kind). I fired up Safari and most of my default tabs failed to load - my uStart home page was fine, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn were all down, Amazon was OK, others were hit and miss. Results weren’t consistent on my iPad - I could see Facebook for example. The network connection looked OK, the wireless seemed to be OK, and one of the boys was playing on the Xbox without any apparent problems. So I rebooted the router which had no effect on anything. I checked the BT Broadband status pages - but couldn’t access them!

For a brief moment I managed to get onto Twitter on my iPad, and it turned out to be a BT Broadband issue with their DNS servers and it was nationwide - although BT weren’t owning up to it. Changing to Google DNS servers helped fix some of the problems; not all of them, but enough to start getting on with resolving my Smart Mailboxes. And at least I now knew that this was a problem beyond my control that I couldn't fix.

In one search I found a reference to the Mail Tags plug-in which had been causing some problems with Smart Mailboxes. I duly removed Mail Tags and the problem was resolved. Re-installing Mail Tags didn’t appear to have any negative effects, so at least that mystery was solved.

By late Saturday afternoon the problems at BT appeared to have been resolved and normal internet service was resumed. Even though the Smart Mailbox problem was fixed, I’d got it into my head that there was a major problem with the SD Card and it needed fixing. I copied my Mail folder back to the MBA flash drive, cloned the card onto an external hard disk and reformatted it. I then returned the system back to it’s previous state. After various iterations of this and still without any idea of what the problem (or even if there was a real problem) I gave up and went to bed.

Everything seemed to be working normally on Sunday morning so I decided to leave it well alone and enjoy the day. With this new contract, my weekends had become like gold dust, and I didn’t want to waste them on chasing rainbow problems.

But on Sunday evening as I started to get ready for the following week I started having major network problems.  Both the Belkin Thunderbolt hub ethernet connection and my private wireless connection were self-assigning IP addresses and not connecting to the internet. The main household wireless connection was OK, as were all the iDevices in the house, so it wasn’t another BT cock-up. I started wondering about the changes I'd made while investigating yesterday's outage. Bit by bit, I rebuilt the network but nothing made any difference. …Until I unplugged and reconnected the power line connection next to the BT HomeHub and like magic everything started working normally in an instant. I should have known better - I’d restarted the power line connection upstairs but not at the source, where it’s most likely to have a problem.

Once you get into a problem solving mindset you see problems everywhere - even (especially?) where there are none. And sometimes, especially when you are tired and frustrated, you just end up making things worse. A few things can help to stop this mindset clicking in:

• If the system has been working fine and something goes wrong, look outside the system before you start ‘fixing’ it internally.
• Keep a checklist of common external problems to look for before you start digging in places that you needn’t be digging
• Stop digging when you find yourself starting to fix problems that weren’t there previously

Sometimes our urge to tinker is overwhelming and it needs to be controlled. Life’s too short and there are enough problems to deal with, without creating new and imaginary ones!

I Want a True Alpha Mail for my Macs (♂)

As I've indicated in these posts previously, I was a fully paid up member of 'The Establishment' for many years before going freelance and switching from corporation mandated Wintel boxes to Macs and the Apple infrastructure. I used to receive and process hundreds of emails every day when I was in a senior management position and I have to admit that Microsoft's Outlook was actually pretty good at the job. On the odd occasion that there were problems it was usually a server issue rather than a software problem.

Most importantly, Outlook hasn't really changed much over all the years I've used it. Sure, the appearance of Outlook 2013 is different to its counterpart from 10 years ago, but most of the features and workflows are similar. The guys at Microsoft don't make a habit of tinkering with the programme every release and breaking things that didn't need fixing in the first place.

In fact, when I first switched to the Mac, I eschewed Apple Mail in favour of Entourage, and only ditched it when the volumes of incoming email started to get back up to silly levels and the single database structure became too fragile. I reluctantly moved to Apple Mail and have stuck with it ever since. I have a very complex system of mailboxes and rules which makes sure that all incoming and outgoing mail is stored where I can easily find it. I then use MailTags to highlight specific types of mail like Invoices, Receipts and Licences.

But with every release of OS X I get really mad when I load up Mail for the first time and I find that things no longer work they way they used to, or fail to work at all :-

• Inevitably, Mail add-ons will be broken (my perennial favourite, DockStar, is not even being supported by its original owners because they're fed up of having to keep updating it). I know that Mail APIs are largely unpublished so this is to be expected until Apple decides to make them public
• Sharing Mail across a network of machines of different ages is no longer possible once a Mac loses it's ability to run the latest OS because internal Mail structures are not backwards compatible
• Rules seem to break with every new version of Mail for no apparent reason

Apple Mail 7.0 that arrived with Mavericks has had a lot of press because of its inability to play nicely with Gmail (largely because Google decided to implement a non-standard version of the IMAP protocol). I don't use Gmail directly - but my Virgin UK ISP uses a version of Gmail as its mail manager. Despite having read most of the details of the issues, and now having the latest update installed, I've yet to resolve my specific problem, which is that almost all my mail bypasses the Inbox and goes straight into an Archive mailbox (also bypassing the rules processing). This archive mailbox never existed prior to release 7 so I have no idea who owns it, or how to get rid of it. Or how to stop it taking over my mail!

My only option at present is to regularly process the Archive mailbox using Alt+Cmd+L which forces the rules to run on all messages in the mailbox - that way at least I know there's a copy in the right place. Once I'm happy that things are in their proper mailboxes I then have to delete everything from the Virgin mail servers through webmail. This is not a satisfactory state of play!!

I don't particularly want to ditch Apple Mail. I've got used to it, it mostly does what it's supposed to do, mostly does it pretty well, and third party support is generally very good. But more critically, I can't find a decent alternative - with the possible exception of Outlook, but I'm not buying another full copy of Office for Mac just to get the Outlook programme. (Why oh why, Microsoft, can't you sell it as an add-on or even an in-app purchase?) I have bought of copy of Unibox but haven't got round to setting it up yet, and I know it's a significant departure from the way I'm used to working.

As far as I can remember the best implementation of Apple Mail was probably the one that shipped with Snow Leopard. Every version since has increased the number of niggles.

Please Apple, get Mail sorted once and for all and either publish or stop tinkering with the APIs. Let me get back to focusing on reading and writing mail rather than having to perform all the housekeeping as well!

Useful Mail Add-Ins and a Small Surprise

I promised to take a closer look at some of the add-ins that make Apple Mail my mail client of choice. But before I do that I wanted to share something I discovered this morning by chance.

Mail Recovery with Time Machine

Like many people who were early adopters of Snow Leopard I had a few teething troubles in the first few weeks with my existing Mail accounts. I've made reference to this in previous posts so won't dwell on it here other than to say that the problem no longer appears to exist. However, there does appear to have been some debris left over from this episode, and I found that I had multiple references to the same account stored in various locations. In an attempt to clear up the unwanted references I had an accident with some of my sent messages (I'm a hoarder and keep copies of everything for years). The message header details appeared in the Sent mailbox but the messages themselves were missing.

By chance I happened to start up Time Machine whilst still in Mail, and discovered that in this instance Time Machine will focus all its attention on your mailboxes. A few clicks later and all my sent mail was restored to its expected state but in a safe mailbox called "Time Machine/Recovered". I referred back to David Pogue's excellent "Mac OS X The Missing Manual (Leopard Edition)" and indeed this feature was available in Leopard and works in a similar way with iPhoto and Address Book.

This is a great feature for recovering from minor glitches with mail without having to resort to a full mail system restore. I wish I'd known about it before!

Letterbox Add-In

Letterbox is one of those "oh-so-simple" things that it really begs the question as to why it wasn't part of the original requirements in the Mail programme. Aaron Harnly's add-in allows a three column view within the main Mail window with the message content in the third column. The current 0.24b5 beta release works with Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and allows a few other goodies like changing alternate line colours in the mail header list, and allowing a two line view also in that window. Letterbox is free, and new updates to support Apple updates are usually very quick off the board.

DockStar

DockStar from ecamm network ($15.00) provides you with a configuration utility for the Mail icon in the dock, allowing the mail count of up to five mailboxes to be displayed on the icon. It does this by adding 'badges' to the icon. Each badge allows different options to be selected, e.g. which mailbox, style and colour of display, and type of count (unread, total, etc.). Badges can also be displayed in the menu bar. Again, a very simple concept but really useful for monitoring incoming mail without constantly having to check the Mail application itself.

MailTags

I've not been using MailTags from indev software ($29.95) for very long so I'm probably not doing justice to its full feature set, but nonetheless I do find it useful. In its simplest form MailTags allows you to tag individual mail messages using categories of your own choice, and to filter messages using those tags. It also allows you to add other metadata to a message such a priority, project, colour, and notes. It also allows you to use your notes to change the visible title of the mail. MailTags are integrated into rules giving you further abilities, and tags are supported by other applications such as Mail Steward, giving you the same filtering abilities in these apps. I find it really useful for marking messages containing invoices and license information using a specific format which allows me much quicker access to the info when I need it, without having to wade through message bodies. Some discipline is required to make full use of such a facility, but it's well worth the effort, especially when it's time to start annual accounts...

I'll cover some of the other add-ins I find useful in a future post, but hopefully there's plenty here to get you salivating. And none of these will make your tongue taste nasty!

A Word or Two about Apple Mail

It's strange to think, but when I started full time work after graduating back in 1984 we didn't have email. In fact my first encounter with email was when I opened a Compuserve account sometime in the late 1980s. It wasn't until the early nineties that I had access to email at work, again through a corporate Compuserve account, but with limited availability. Many of my colleagues had another two or three years to wait before the full roll-out of Novell's Groupwise across the company. By the time I joined a very large Global Outsourcing company in the late nineties, email was more prevalent, and Outlook had become the de facto standard for most businesses. It wasn't long before I was receiving several hundred email messages each day, and by the time I left that corporation I was regularly getting more than a thousand messages a week. I became something of an expert on Outlook simply to be able to manage incoming mail.

When I moved across to the Mac platform I duly purchased Office:Mac 2008 which had just hit the streets. I fully expected Entourage to look and work like Outlook. Boy was I mistaken ! Even getting Entourage to read Outlook data files was a major hassle, although I eventually managed to import my old Outlook messages using third party software. But there was enough of a likeness between the Microsoft's Mac and PC mail offerings to keep me hooked in preference to Mail. I particularly liked Entourage's integration of mail, to-do lists and calendar.

I prevailed with Entourage until earlier this year before deciding to try out Mail in earnest. The Entourage database had started a habit of corrupting itself, and of course Time Machine backups were incorporating the entire database every time it was updated. Archiving in Entourage also left me cursing its designers.

I now use Mail all the time and generally wonder why I ever bothered with Entourage. But it isn't Mail out of the box. I have a set of Add-Ins and tools which give the programme its genuine usefulness. These are Letterbox, DockStar, Growl Mail, Mail Tags and Mail Attachments Iconizer. I also have Mail Act-On installed but I'm still trying to get to grips with that. I use MailSteward for archiving, and this also allows me to get around the problems of incompatibility between the Leopard and Snow Leopard versions of Mail.

Luckily the volume of email that I currently have to deal with is greatly reduced from the madness of a few years ago. But even if it were too suddenly escalate, Apple Mail in the Apple Harvest environment would be more than capable of rising to the situation. It would be even better if:

• Apple would provide a mechanism for properly integrating Mail and iCal without me having to use another third party application like DayLite


• Apple engineers would stop messing about with Mail internals that then break the 3rd party add-ins until the poor developers have a chance to figure out what they've done and are able to catch up (which they generally do very quickly), and leaving the poor user with a broken environment in the meantime

Another time, we'll look at some of the Add-Ins in more detail. Happy emailing...