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Back to My Mac only works sometimes. Time Machine won't restore individual mail messages. Rush Limbaugh's no newb — he owns six Macs, and these are known problems. Have a look and see if you can fix the bugs that made him send out a personal plea to Steve Jobs.

I'll tell you what the problems are. But it's going to be Greek to those of you who don't use Macs and I don't want to spend a whole lot of time with this. But here we go.

  • 1. Back to my Mac, screen sharing, doesn't work. It's intermittent on occasion. Now, I got six computers on the network, maybe it's only meant to go back and forth one computer to the next. And the second thing, and this is the biggie, because I have found a work-around to screen sharing back to my Mac not working, direct access to my IP address I can do it without going back to my Mac.
  • 2. They've got this great new backup program called Time Machine. I primarily live in my mail application. I use it for my word processing. The only time I open word processing is when somebody sends me something in a Word document or whatever. I don't use the phone because of my hearing. Email is everything, and Time Machine will not restore email mailboxes. Restores everything else but that, and ought to restore either a single message or a whole mailbox, and it won't. On one machine, this one here in New York, I have found a way to restore a single message or a multiple list of messages from wherever the Time Machine archive is, but on none of my other five machines does that work. They're identical.

    So, Mr. Jobs, there's got to be somebody who can — this is major. I'm not calling it a bug. They just left it out of the operating system. To not back up — and, by the way, when you open Time Machine in your mail program, it says, "click restore" to back up your in-box or to back up the message you had selected. So it was supposed to, it just doesn't do it. And there's a whole thread at the Apple site of people having the same problem. But posting the problem on the website is not going to solve anything. It's like filing a bug report, goes out to the ether, nobody ever sees it, you never hear.