Mail on my MacBook Pro quit unexpectedly late last week, and when I restarted the program none of my mail or folders were present. It was the middle of a work day, and my Time Machine backup is at home (a USB hard drive connected to my AirPort Extreme) so I could not access last night’s backup.
I decided to just let Mail download my messages again from our server which, considering the size of my mailbox, took several hours. When I got home, I set out to let Time Machine rescue me. Since I had all of my Mail downloaded from the server after the “event,” I did not restore that from the backup. I was left without folders and rules, which was not acceptable. I soon realized that opening messages from Spotlight searches gave only the broken alias message.
I restored the following folders from Time Machine, restarted the computer for good measure, and was right back to where things were the night before.
~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist
~/Library/Mail/SmartMailboxes.plist
~/Library/Mail/Signatures
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.searchhistory.plist
To fix the broken alias message given when trying to open messages found by Spotlight, I forged Spotlight to re-index my entire hard drive. I was dissatisfied by the speed of Spotlight searches, and re-indexing made searches blazing fast. I used mdutil, a command-line utility pre-installed on every Mac. It’s used the manage the metadata stores used by Spotlight. In Terminal, I typed:
sudo mdutil -E /
Despite the inconvenience, both Mail and Spotlight are considerably quicker during normal use. I’d call this a big success, thanks completely to Time Machine.