So this morning Mail.app on my Mac started to do strange things, like say “Can’t delete message server does not allow operation (moving to folder “null”)” or something like that. I don’t really remember. Things looked strange too – for some reason my trash can icon for my main email account had turned into a world icon, and all the folders were duplicated under that. Strange. So, I did what any under-caffeinated, not-thinking person would do at 6:30am, I deleted the folders.

Then my entire mail server disappeared. After I clicked the “this will delete files on the server and is a non-recoverable operation, and are you really sure you want to do this? Like, seriously? McFly?” button. Maybe that wasn’t exactly what it said, but it was close.

So it looks like for some reason Mail.app got confused, thought my entire mail hierarchy was supposed to go under the trash can (I vaguely remember this happening once before and I know that I needed to set the trash can up using the “Use this folder as…” function) and aliased things there. It also was syncing and re-downloaded everything to be under the trash can, which was what clued me in. Along with not being able to delete email.

So I don’t know what happened there. But I did wipe out my entire email account. Which goes back to maybe 1999 or so. That is bad.

I run my mailserver on a virtual private linux box from Rimuhosting.com, with whom I’ve been very happy.

Anyway, they take weekly snapshots of the disk image, and have an easy process to restore to a backup image (they keep two it looks like.) So I restored to the backup image. I probably lost a blog post or two (maybe not though, I haven’t been writing much lately) but anyway, I regained my many years worth of email. So hooray for rimuhosting! And boo for me.