I was closing in on 2000 unread emails, so I sorted my inbox by From instead of Date, looked through the pile for actual correspondence and other items of importance, opened those, marked the rest of them read, and set the view to Date again, starting with the most recent. If I missed your email all that might be one reason why.

My mail client is Apple’s Mail.app, on both laptop and mobile devices. Besides groaning under the weight of almost a million emails going back to 1995, it suffers from a vexing way to automatically route certain kinds of mails to a mailbox just for those kinds of mails. Such as newsletters to a mailbox called Newsletters. Here is what you do: click on a newsletter in your mail account’s Inbox, open Settings, click on the Rules menu, click on Add Rule, and then name a rule for what you are about to do in a form to say that mail from that address (or other variable) routes to the mailbox of your choice. Then, a popover gives you a choice to Apply the rule or not. Then, back in the mailbox, you Select All, and then right (or control) click to Apply Rules. Sometimes this works. Mostly, at least for me, it does not. At least not if I do Select All, so all the mail from that one address gets sent to the Newsletters mailbox. But if I click on one email at a time, it does work. Stupid system, but there it is.

I am told by Hover, the host for Searls.com email, that one problem with Apple’s Mail.app is that it does not pull down only, say, the last three months of emails from the IMAP server. It wants them all. And I have over half a million emails there: 510,777, to be precise. My Webmail view tells me 373,134 of those are Junk. A look at the most recent of those shows that many are not. So I am not inclined to kill them all.

Many of those half million emails just recently moved to my IMAP server yesterday. They were recovered mails that had been lost in the 2022 ransomware attack against Rackspace, which had hosted all Searls.com mail since the last millennium. See, when the lost mail was finally recovered by Rackspace, it was sent to me in a form only Microsoft Outlook, which I had never used, could read. So I got the Mac version of Outlook, imported all the recovered email, but then it all disappeared before I could move it elsewhere, such as to my IMAP server at Hover. This weekend, however, a friend familiar with the problem told me that mail disappeared for lots of people when Microsoft came out with a new version of Outlook. To fix that, he said, I needed to select Legacy Outlook in Settings. So I did, and all the mail reappeared. Then I connected Outlook to my Hover server, and all those lost emails went up there. I assume.

Meanwhile, my Apple Mail client is very slow when dealing with my Searls.com mail account. Fixing that is the next challenge.