POP3 Mail and Address Book has emptied!

SpamSieve
1

I recently did some housekeeping on my Mum’s iBook G4 (OSX 10.4.10), part of which was purchasing and installing SpamSieve into Mail. This all went fine. Today she said all the mail in her POP3 inbox had gone, she couldn’t send/receive and all her address book contacts had gone (Except hers and Apples).

I’ve got the iBook now and have noticed that her account type in Mail has somehow changed to a .Mac account (did I somehow do this, or did she or did SpamSieve???). This is obviously the part of the problem as the
email address now has ‘@mac.com’ appended to the end and the incoming mail server is now ‘mail.mac.com’ and the outgoing is ‘smtp.mac.com:her_email_address’ which is all wrong. I’m unable to change the account type back to POP or the incoming mail server from ‘mail.mac.com’ (it’s greyed out) back to what it was.

I have now created a second account with the correct POP settings and have received in all unread email, but the read email messages have gone. I am unable to send as the new correct pop account is only offered the incorrect outgoing server (‘smtp.mac.com:her_email_address’).

I’ve also just noticed that SpamSieve does not launch as it should when I launch Mail, even though It was purchased and the scripts installed correctly. When I launch it independently, it now says it is a demo!

I feel the Mail/Address Book issues are connected and that maybe the application(s) database(s) have been corrupted. I’ve tried the Address Book remedy at http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5248351&#5248351 but this does nothing. The ‘user’>Library>Mail folder shows the two accounts as two separate folders. The recently recreated account folder has the new unread messages in the 'INBOX.mbox folder, but the older account folder (which now has ‘MAC-’ added to the front of its name) only has ‘info.plist’ in a ‘INBOX.imapmbox’ folder!

I don’t believe any back-ups are available. Can anyone help me restore her old unread mail, and possibly her address book contacts? Has anyone else experienced this after installing SpamSieve?

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For the record, there is no code in SpamSieve to delete Mail settings or Address Book entries. It sounds like there was a general data corruption problem on your mother’s Mac, which wiped out the mail, address book, and settings for SpamSieve (which is why it doesn’t remember your mother’s serial number). The first thing you should do is try to prevent future disk damage by booting the Mac from its original install DVD and repairing it with Disk Utility. Until you do that, if the disk’s catalog is damaged anything that you do could overwrite existing files on the disk, causing further problems.

Since it sounds like lots of files were damaged, I wouldn’t try to re-enter the various settings on her Mac. You might be building on an unstable foundation. If possible, you should back up her home folder to another drive, erase the disk and install a fresh copy of Mac OS X, and then restore the user data. That would give the best chance of starting from a clean slate.

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Thanks for the speedy response Michael and for your thoughts/remedies on the problem. I also think it is a DB corruption and the response to my similar posting on the Apple Forum seems to back this up.

This won’t dissuade me from promoting your software to any mac user I meet, which I do regularly.