The One True Sword Daddy returns!

…in Fall 2026.

Dear Elon,

No sooner do you announce your own political-spoiler party than my X feed turns into an endless shitshow of cryptocurrency fraud, Chinese bots rewriting history, and global warming hysteria, things that have never before appeared there. Coincidence, or something more?

(seriously, I blocked/muted more accounts in ten minutes today than I have in six months)

Dear Apple,

You filthy sons of bitches erased every mail-handling rule from Mail.app on my Mac when I upgraded my iPhone. No questions, no notifications, no backup. I can probably reconstruct it by browsing through my full-disk backups and putting it back, but these configs had survived dozens of semi-stable upgrades in the past. You just couldn’t fucking stop yourselves from using your “cloud” sync to overwrite existing data during phone setup (where I explicitly said “don’t sync email through iCloud”), could you? Guess I was holding it wrong again.

…

For reference, the data is in ~/Library/Mail/V10/SyncedRules.plist, and sure enough it was fine on July 3rd and wiped clean on July 4th. It’s plist-as-XML, which means it combines the worst features of two file formats, but at least it’s not one of Apple’s internal undocumented-garbage formats where it pretends to be XML but is filled with binary blobs. If I can’t just put it back and have it work, I should be able to mangle the plist contents into shape.

[Update: you must also completely delete the matching block in SyncedFilesInfo.plist, or it will immediately wipe the restored file again. Even once the rules are back, they will not be active, and you have to click them one-by-one.]

(and, yes, I see you also disabled SpamSieve, because for all your posturing about privacy, you have a strong interest in ads reaching user inboxes)

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