A simple and tedious fix to your Mail.app rule issues
Some people have been having problems with the Mail.app rules in Leopard. Mail filtering rules somehow don't seem to be working the way they should.
A little sleuthing let me to a file in ~/Library/Mail called MessageRules.plist. This file contains all the rules you've created as well as the apple rules (eg. junkmail rules and 'news from apple' rules). What I noticed was that this file also contained very old rules that I had created, but were not visible in the rules list in Mail.app.
My hunch was that the file had become corrupt. So I removed it as well as MessageRules.plist.backup and restarted mail. I made some new rules and it worked! I actually think this issue may have started before I upgraded to leopard, so it's worth a shot in Tiger as well.
In Summary, remove these files:
~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist ~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist.backup
Wait, that's not tedious! You said this would be tedious! OK, as promised here's the tedious part:
Go and remake all your rules in apple mail again.
Ta-Da!
Posted by Luke Cowell on December 20, 2007 at 08:48 AM
Create Packages for OSX using snapshots
If your an administer for an OS X network, you probably know how much time can be saved by creating a package (.pkg) installation versus manually installing the software on each workstation. Many pieces of software use old or proprietary installers vs. packages, so building a package can take a little patience. That was the wind up, here's the pitch.
Building packages just got a lot easier with the snapshot feature in the newest version of packagemaker. Start the snapshot recording by choosing 'Add Snapshot Package...', run your installation procedure of whatever software you want to make into a package, and when you stop it will show you what files have changed.
How is this magic done ? Spotlight keeps track of which files to reindex by adding hooks to all the low level write functions on the disk. You update or create a file and the OS knows that it needs to be reindexed. There's now a public framework called fsvents that keeps track of all file operations. So, all packagemaker needs to do is hook into that for the duration of the install.
(This is also how timemachine knows which files to back up on your computer without scanning your whole disk)
Check outArs technica for a more detailed explanation about how fseventsd. http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/7
Once the snapshot is generated you have a chance to choose which files you want to include in the snapshot. Remember that files besides the installer will change during the period of the install. For example logs will be updated, but you definitely don't want to include those.
That's it. Much easier than manually collecting those files.