MailTimeMachineHelper

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Nick Naym - 01 Dec 2008 14:03 GMT

I noticed something called " MailTimeMachineHelper" inside the Mail.app
package. I can't find anything about it in Help, nor online.

What is it, where is it, and what does it do?

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Mike Rosenberg - 01 Dec 2008 14:10 GMT

> I noticed something called " MailTimeMachineHelper" inside the Mail.app
> package. I can't find anything about it in Help, nor online.
>
> What is it, where is it, and what does it do?

Why would you expect to find any documentation for something you only
see if you look in the contents of a package? Anyway, I would guess
that, based on its name, its purpose is to make Mail work with Time
Machine.

I don't understand your question of where it is, though, since you're
the one who found it and knows exactly where it is.

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Nick Naym - 01 Dec 2008 14:49 GMT

>> I noticed something called " MailTimeMachineHelper" inside the Mail.app
>> package. I can't find anything about it in Help, nor online.
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
> that, based on its name, its purpose is to make Mail work with Time
> Machine.

It _appears_ to have something to do with restoring/recovering Mail
messages/folders.

> I don't understand your question of where it is, though, since you're
> the one who found it and knows exactly where it is.

Neither do I.

I had assumed that it existed as a separate app from Mail.app, located
somewhere on my HD.

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iMac (24", 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 320 GB HDD) OS X (10.5.4)

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Jolly Roger - 01 Dec 2008 15:10 GMT

> >> I noticed something called " MailTimeMachineHelper" inside the Mail.app
> >> package. I can't find anything about it in Help, nor online.
[quoted text clipped - 8 lines]
> It _appears_ to have something to do with restoring/recovering Mail
> messages/folders.

It's pretty obvious that's exactly what it is. But why do you ask? Have
you tried to restore messages in Mail? What happens when you invoke TIme
Machine with Mail's viewer window frontmost?

> > I don't understand your question of where it is, though, since you're
> > the one who found it and knows exactly where it is.
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> I had assumed that it existed as a separate app from Mail.app, located
> somewhere on my HD.

You assumed that *what* existed as a separate application?

The Finder is but one application that has Time Machine integration
built-in. Mail, Address Book, iPhoto '08, and any other application can
also have integration with Time Machine. There's a public API - all that
is needed is for the application developer to add support for it.

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Mike Rosenberg - 01 Dec 2008 17:24 GMT

That's what I said, its purpose is to make Mail work with Time Machine,
the program that's part of Leopard that backs up your drive and allows
you to restore from that backup.

So you open a package, find something inside that package, and assume
that, despite the fact that that's where it is, and you _know_ it's
there since you went through the effort to find it there, and assume
it's actually somewhere else??

Seriously, the purpose of having packages in the first place is to
bundle things together that are meant to be together, in such a way that
the average user isn't going to muck about with them. If the intention
were that you would use MailTimeMachineHelper as a standalone app,
that's exactly what it would be.

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Jolly Roger - 01 Dec 2008 21:10 GMT

> > I had assumed that it existed as a separate app from Mail.app, located
> > somewhere on my HD.
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
> were that you would use MailTimeMachineHelper as a standalone app,
> that's exactly what it would be.

For the life of me, I can't fathom why anyone would *want* it to be a
separate application. The whole idea of TIme Machine is that any
application developer can integrate support for it directly into their
application, so that a separate application isn't required. All
applications that support TIme Machine use the same slick Time Machine
interface for backup restoration. That's kind of the whole point to
having a Time Machine API.

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Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / December 2008

MailTimeMachineHelper