Apple security update causes McMail havoc
Posted on Nov 30th by William in William's IT strategy
Oh man. Hurrah for VMWare and for biodiversity in operating systems. Apple send me a security update for Tiger 10.4.11, which first kills the sending of mails from Mail then wrecks Mail completely, taking with it various web based apps like Spanning Sync. The symptom is
Connection failed: There may be a problem with the mail server or network. Check the settings for account “William Heath (zen)” or try again.The server error encountered was: The connection to the server “williamheath.net” on port 0 timed out.
It wont let Mail quit – you have to force it. It wont let Thunderbird work on MacOS either. You end up doing an absurd two-handed cick to kill the error message then click to navigate through network preferences.
After a day or so half solving the problem I’ve fired up Thunderbird on the XP machine under VMWare on the McBook (thanks Richard! Thanks Jerry!). It works. It gets all the mail from the server. And it can see the McBook’s MacOS files. But how do you get an Apple address book into Thunderbird? Apple Mail will only export to VCard, while TBird talks LDIF and CSV. Well, some brothers in Switzerland seem to have solved it, and offer an online application that takes up to 8MB of address book, converts it and sends it back to you as LDIF. The have a nice-enough sounding privacy policy. Hey! It works! (Did I just breach the DPA by sending data for processing in a non-EU country? Is that Richard Thomas’ goon squad knocking on the door?) Thank you, mountain people. Yodel on.
Hurrah for the Interweb. And let’s see what naughty old Apple have to say about breaking my happy Mc-Software world just when I least needed it.
Note: If anyone was is missing a reply form me in last 3-4 days please just repeat the request. I think several days worth of my replies vanished into thin air. Sorry about that.
