Mail Rules (Edited)

Can anyone tell me where they're stored?

As seems to happen quite often, the latest update caused a few of them to go missing

Not calamitous but irritating... it would be handy to be able to simply restore them from Time Machine.


edit- Just realised I wasn't clear. I know where the plist file is, are there any other associated files that I would need to restore as well?

Edited by billford (Wed 13-May-09 11:48:17)

Don't know about Leopard but in Tiger, all the rules are in User/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist. Don't think you need anything else.

lct

Thanks for the reassurance .

I did a bit of checking- the backed-up file was around 85KB, the one after the update was 64KB. I find that file size suspicious... but it wasn't simply truncated, complete rules went missing.

I wonder if quitting Mail caused the problem rather than the update, I seldom do that otherwise. More investigation needed

Well, I restored the old plist file and all seems fine.

I then tried everything I could think of¹ of to replicate the loss of rules, and totally failed

I'll wait until 10.5.8 and take careful notes of before and after.



¹ Except a system restore to 10.5.6 and re-update, I'm not that bothered

I did a bit of checking- the backed-up file was around 85KB, the one after the update was 64KB.

That's an enormous number of rules - my rules file only runs to 16K I do use quite a few Smart Folders, though.

Do your reinstated old rules work OK? Is it possible that some of your rules were incompatible with the updated Mail so it ditched them?

Another thought - could there be a default max number of rules that gets enforced every time you update?

I've certainly never had any problems after quitting Mail but, as I said, I'm still on 10.4.11 for my mail.

lct

I've got about 50 rules- basically just about everything coming in gets moved to its own folder. I prefer that over using smart folders.

The re-instated old rules seem to be working fine, though there's always the chance of a trap waiting for me I suppose

A default maximum number of rules is a possibility, but I'd have expected it to be imposed permanently, ie at some point the "Add Rule" button would grey out, or quitting Mail would shrink the file.

It's odd, like I said I'll make a note of everything when the next update comes around