Goodbye, Parallels

Sep 11, 08:37 AM by Eric Allen

I’ve been a happy user of Parallels Desktop for over a year now. A few weeks ago, though, things went south. My Windows XP virtual machine started randomly pegging my CPU for no good reason. It slowed down to a crawl and had to be rebooted. This went on for some time, so I decided to start fresh. I tried to set up a fresh VM, and half way through the install bam, a kernel panic. I tried again to no avail. I tried a different XP image. Same thing. I finally broke down and contacted the oh-so-helpful Parallels tech support. They told me reinstalling Parallels would fix the problem. It didn’t, so I went back to them with yet another panic.log. They gave me a great idea: format my computer and rebuild from scratch. Yeah. So just because their software is misbehaving I need to sacrifice a couple of days of my life to rebuild my computer.

The good news is that this is a competitive marketplace, and VMWare Fusion has reached 1.0. During all of this trouble I downloaded the trial, and had XP up and running within 20 minutes. The virtual machine definitely felt snappier than Parallels, and Fusion has all the features I would want. Since Parallels wanted to charge me another $60 for 3.0 (which catches up to Fusion), the choice was simple: Goodbye Parallels, hello Fusion.

Recover deleted messages in Mail.app

Mar 10, 05:13 PM by Eric Allen

I accidentally selected all of the messages in my archive folder in Mail.app today and hit delete. I was trying to delete everything in my inbox, but missed. I’ve got it set up to not use a trash, so the messages just disappeared. However, upon further inspection they were still sitting on my hard drive. One hint I found while Googling gave me an idea. If the messages are still there (instead of in a backup as in that case), all I have to do is delete the Envelope Index file and they should all come back! Sure enough, after navigating to ~/Library/Mail and deleting the 13MB Envelope Index file, Mail started up and decided it needed to index all of my mail again. However, I ended up in the same predicament, with all of my messages indexed but not visible. So, with a little more digging I discovered that each emlx file has some flags embedded in it, including one for deletion. No problem, I just whipped up a Ruby script to go through an emlx file, search for the flags, and undelete it. It took about five minutes to go though all of my mail, but it worked.

Procedure

  1. Close Mail.app
  2. Make a backup of ~/Library/Mail (just in case)
  3. Delete ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index
  4. download my ruby script
  5. navigate to the Messages directory of the mail folder you want to recover in Terminal (e.g. ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Archive.mbox/Messages)
  6. run the following commands in terminal
    1. mkdir temp
    2. for i in `ls *.emlx`; do ruby [path to ruby script] < $i > temp/$i;done
    3. rm *.emlx
    4. mv temp/* .
  7. open Mail.app
  8. Go to the Mailbox menu and select “Rebuild” at the bottom
  9. see your mail magically appear!

Email me if you need any help with this since I have failed to make it robust or include the actual shell commands.

Update: I just did this to my sent folder again and the process worked beautifully.