10.8 update done.

Used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable second backup of my boot drive (the other backup is on Time Machine).

Booted off the new backup and erased the built-in SSD on my MBP using Disk Utility. Should I have done something special here to get the SSD to top performance?

Then I installed 10.8 onto the SSD and used migration assistant to move over my user account, settings and apps.

I had to use Software Update to get Java which isn't included by default and then update both Little Snitch and GlimmerBlocker, also re-doing my network proxy settings which weren't carried over.

So far so good. I expect I may have to fiddle with at least the PHP installation to get some of my Automator processes working, but I won't have time to check that out until tomorrow. Next week I'll start checking against the bugs I found with Lion.

Mail is in the process of "importing" my messages - I hate this step with every OS update.

I also just noticed that I can't resize this text box in Safari 6. Hmmm...

Ok, what I would think would be by far the easiest thing to handle, migration of email and associated settings is somewhat pooched.

Mail's display was somewhat wrong when it fired up and all my rules and signatures are gone. Server settings seem to have survived.

Tom, any tips on a quick migration of this stuff after the fact?

I'd say wipe out anything Mail related in Library. So ~/Library/Mail. ~/Library/Mail Downloads and the com.apple.MailMigratorService.plist in Preferences. Also go nuke ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail.

Open up the Time Machine backups and restore ~/Library/Mail along with the com.apple.Mail preference in ~/Library/Preferences. And any other Mail related folders from the backup.

This should trigger another run of the migration assistant. The ~/Library/Containers is a new one to me, looks like this may be the sandboxing, and possibly the migration didn't grab everything to put in there for some reason.

I didn't have a "com.apple.MailMigratorService.plist" file. But I nuked the others and restored the mail folders and preference files.

Opening Mail now. Fingers crossed. 82000 messages - 3 minutes of importing (on SSD)....

It didn't work. Same as before. There's only a single rule and it's one Apple put in there in this version. "News from Apple"

This is getting to be painful. If I could easily export rules I'd boot back up to Lion and do that... I'll see about that. I searched Google for the issue I'm having without luck finding anything.

I've already tried copying over the two rules files from Lion with no luck.

Found a thread about it from 3 days ago using Google. But, when I log in to my Apple account, it says I'm not allowed to read it. Google cached copy produces an error. The search results show a large enough snippet that I know it's the same symptom:



Can anyone else open that thread? Unlike many other threads, this one forces a login. I've had that happen before, but I've always been able to read the topic afterwards.

I have a feeling that Mountain Lion will be at least as bug-ridden as Lion was, likely worse. Check this one out:

I thought I'd turn on NOTES in the iCloud preferences to allow syncing. It prompts for a ".me" account and you can't do anything unless you provide one. It indicates one will be created if you type in an address.

OK, I found a limitation - a stupid one, but one nonetheless. So I fire up the notes app and write a small temp note, then close the app.

Launch it again and I get a prompt telling me that I have an unsynced note and whether I'd like to share notes through iCloud. I pick YES and it drops me back into the Notes UI. Nothing looks different.

I click the Notes menu and pick the "accounts item" - it's the "Mail Contacts and Calendars" pref pane, which is most definitely a little confusing next to iCloud because it includes an iCloud item that duplicates the entire iCloud pref pane UI inside a box. Ugh...

Notes is TURNED OFF in here, even though I was asked about it and said yes. So I click to turn it on. And it DOESN'T prompt me for a .me account - it asks if I want to merge notes and I say yes. It then stays ON. If I go back to the iCloud pref pane Nota is also now turned on in there.

But... Quit System Preferences, go back to the Mail... pref pane and Notes is again OFF.

Lame.

Oh, Mail in iCloud pref pane also asks for .me account, but in the other pref pane in the iCloud section it turns on without a fuss. But then can't be turned off. Until you quit and restart System Preferences when it's magically already off.

Super lame.

I worked very closely with people from Apple along the entire development cycle of every OS from 1996 to 2005. Apple has always had an insanely hard time preparing a new OS in 2-3 years. Now they want to do TWO OSes per year. It was evident with Snow Leopard things were on the way downhill, proven as a matter of fact with Lion. Mountain Lion hasn't done anything to change my perception at this point. I've never had these kinds of issues with any Mac OS X release after 2003.

I get the same error. Very annoying, to say the least. Sorry I can't help.

Software Update now uses the Mac App Store - which has the same horrible UI/experience as the previous version.

If you hide updates they appear to be gone forever. Selecting the item "Show all software updates" from the Store menu makes that option go away but the updates are never again displayed...

..Until you quit and restart Software Update or the App Store app.

Arrrrgh.

Update on Mail rules.... More puzzling. The rules files are actually intact. They contain all my rules, but they aren't showing up in Mail.


Mail's rules are now kept in an entirely different file, "SyncedRules.plist" which is also XML as before, but with a very slightly different format. I noticed a couple of small changes, but a copy-paste from the older file only produced a couple of dozen blank rules in Mail. The first time.

With more careful cutting and pasting of only the rules, and keeping the rest of the new file I was able to get them all in there. They were all turned OFF by default so I had to manually turn them on in the UI and then manually select all the new mail and manually pick the "Apply Rules" menu item.

I'll look at the signatures tomorrow. I've had enough of this hair ripping out for tonight.

Arrrrgh.

Just got back on the computer for the first time since last night and... All the rules I inserted are GONE. WTF.

EDIT: (a little while later....)

More poking reveals a file called SyncedFilesInfo.plist which contains the path to the rules file previously mentioned, the empty signature file and a smartmailboxes file.

This file is a preference telling Mail that each of these is being Synced with iCloud. Something I've never set up and something that explains what's happened.

My guess is that Mail went to sync with iCloud for these items and since nothing is in iCloud it cleared all my local content instead of merging it. I still consider it an egregious bug, but at least I'm confident as to the cause of the issue.

There's also another rules file called UnsyncedRules.plist that I've now copied my rules into. The came into Mail already turned ON, unlike before, and they've survived multiple quit/restarts. My hypothesis is that these will not be blanked because as the filename implies, they're not going to sync with iCloud.

In terms of the larger picture, there is absolutely no option that I've seen to specify that any of this stuff should be or shouldn't be synced. Now any way to control whether or not a newly created rule gets synced or not - the test rule I made did end up in the SYNC file.

Clusterfuck.

Clearing the contents of or deleting the file SyncedFilesInfo.plist causes Mail to crash on startup - completely unrecoverable. Wow.

I've verified that a few bugs from Lion have been fixed in Mail. But I keep finding more new bugs, some of them critical:

New to Mountain Lion: Reply to a message in one of your local folders and your FROM address will *not* be automatically set to the recipient address of that original message (what has always happened). Instead it will be set to the primary address of the email account that appears first in your list of inboxes in your mail window's source list.

New to Mountain Lion: Compose a new message while a message in local folder is selected and the FROM address will be automatically set to the first address of the first account listed in the source list. It has always used the recipient of the message that was currently select (if it was one of your defined addresses) before. This one I don't mind too much.

From at least Lion 10.7.4: Creating a NEW message will not use the selected FROM address if that address is not the first address listed for a particular account. Example, an account with 4 email addresses listed, cannot send from addresses 2-4. It's always been possible to list additional email addresses (like aliases) with every account. Now it's impossible to use them to send mail. The copy of the message in SENT MAIL shows up correctly with the selected email address as FROM, however the mail actually gets sent out as from your first email address listed in the drop-down menu of all your email addresses. *

* The drop-down list of email addresses are sorted in the order of INBOXES listed in the mail window's source list, but if a change is made to the inbox order, the email list is only updated after quitting and restarting Mail.


These three are very dangerous. With the first two it's possible to catch the issue before sending out the email, with the third it's not. It's impossible to use these other email addresses in Mountain Lion to compose new messages.