Last time I was in New York or maybe two times ago, I asked on air, an open-air plea to Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, Inc., to help out with a couple problems I was having with the new operating system: OS 10.5 Leopard...Both have been resolved through the diligent work of an engineer that Apple assigned my IT guy, and the primary problem was with their Time Machine program.

They've got this great backup program called Time Machine, and it automatically backs up every hour. You can have a third-party application to set the interval to different times if you don't want to have it done every hour and fill up the backup drive. Regardless, I live.. in my e-mail application; because I don't use the phone much, because I don't like the phone. There's always somebody on the other end... E-mail has become my number-one way of communicating with people, and that's where I do all of my work... I've got four — I got them installed, by the way, last weekend — brand-new Mac Pros, 32 gigs of RAM, eight core processors, all the way the fastest speed, whatever they are. I can't remember off the top of the bat. Oh! This is funny, too. I wanted to get two super-drive bays. I've put a Blu-ray drive in the top bay. When I mentioned this last time, one of the snarky comments in one of these blogs was, "I don't think Limbaugh even knows what Blu-ray is, because Apple has not made Blu-ray available."

Well, Apple didn't, but there are third-parties. I've got a Blu-ray drive, and I've got some Blu-ray blank disks, dual-sided, 50 gigabyte. Now, you can't play Blu-ray movies on them because the hardware is not on the computer yet to play Blu-ray movies, but... I got it for data transfer. Anyway, so the Blu-ray is in there and the thing is working just fine and dandy. But the mail program, this Time Machine, is amazing. It just backs up everything on the computer as often as you want, every hour or less.., and then you can go back in time... If you've deleted an e-mail accidentally or any other file from anywhere on the computer, you can go back and get it and have it restored to the present day on your hard drive — except, mail wouldn't do that. I couldn't go back and access mail. I could see it. The e-mail or a series of e-mails that I wanted from say three months were there.

I'd click restore, and they did restore, but in some esoteric file in the user library in an unidentified way, so I couldn't identify which ones they were. They did not restore them in the mail index in the actual application. An Apple engineer was assigned to us, and the fix took place last night. I did two weeks of trying it, creating logs for the Apple engineers to look at, and they found the problem. Basically, what we had to do was delete the null mail folder (that's the folder that processes all e-mail) and then we told the mail app to rebuild its internal director via terminal command, and now it is working flawlessly. So I just wanted to take a moment to thank people at Apple. I'm not going to mention the name of the engineer. I would love to, but if I did, this guy would be taking heat for the rest of his career from people for helping me. But they were very cooperative, and I think it's going to end up having to be a system-wide fix, which is good, because it's been discovered. The other issue was if you have a dot-Mac account — if you have one of those you can use it to share the screens of your other computers. Now, I have two here in Florida and two in New York, and they are not synchronized because I'm not in New York very much...

What if I need an e-mail from there? I can get it now with the screen sharing, but it wasn't working via dot-Mac. I had set it up to work with a direct correct on a VNC direct connect, but it wasn't working via back to my Mac. They fixed that as well. That has been done. So I just wanted to thank Apple again for taking the time to look into this, because the backup and the Time Machine application used with mail app was crucial... Somebody said, "Make 'em name the patch after you." There will be a patch. I don't think they'll say anything about it other than in the release notes of the next security update or system update. But, anyway, I wanted to fill you in on the details of this, because it was very nice them and they were extremely diligent. It took a lot of time to find out what the glitch was. We had to log every time we try it, and we tried a bunch of times on purpose knowing it would fail creating logs of what was going on. So it was discovered that the null mail folder had to be deleted and then rebuilt in the internal directory with the terminal command. It was a small little terminal command, too, for those of you geeks on the blogs — and, no, I'm not going to share the terminal command here.

Nice work, Rush. Think Jobs will come over next time we have a problem?

I have an announcement to make: Apple corporate called. Somebody from high up the corporate ladder at Apple Computer in California, out in Cupertino, called the office.

He continues:

When did you get the message? When did they call, late yesterday afternoon? All right, they called at nine o'clock this morning, very, very, very nice guy, put my IT guy in touch with them, working — No, it was not Al Gore. Ha! No, Mr. Snerdley [his producer], it was not Al Gore. I'm not going to mention the gentleman's name because the Mac user community that hates me will start bombarding this guy. He's a West Coast guy. He called about six a.m. out there and said, "I'm here now," so our IT guy is working with him. That's cool. Yes, it's official. It's not a hacker. It was official. Don't start gumming up the works. It was really true.

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.

Mr. Jobs, please help me. I know we don't agree on anything. You love Al Gore — and by the way, I've got no problem with him now, but can you put me to somebody that can get this going, because I know it's gotta work for most people. What am I doing wrong? [My producer] said, "You don't understand it. Jobs has you tagged. He's making sure your computers don't work. If you put out this appeal to Steve Jobs and ask him to help, his reply is going to be, 'Mr. Limbaugh. Do us a favor and endorse Windows.'"

Followup: Rush Limbaugh's Leopard bugs: Can you fix them?