Mac – Restore gmail messages to mail.app after TimeMachine restore

Under Accounts in Preferences, there's a field there called "Email Address:". You can put a comma-separated list of addresses in there, like this:

Now your "Compose" window will have a "From" popup menu that lets you choose your sending address:

AFAIK, this works for pretty much any mail account type, as long as your mail provider allows you to muck around with the From: header.

Zevlag is right. You're not going to be able to do precisely what you were after (true IMAP syncing of chat logs). But here's a couple of things that you can:

First, you could download your chat logs using this method: http://freshhorse.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/leaving-gmail-and-bringing-your-chats-with-you/

• This will take quite a bit of time and I doubt you'd want to do it over and over to keep your logs up-to-date. But it will allow you to have an easily searchable record of your chats on your local machine (Spotlight).

Second you could look into Google's APIs for a way to get at your chats. Here's one example of a script attempting this:

https://gist.github.com/1051628

• This will be even more complicated and still won't get you what you're after but if your a bit of a hacker you might be able to put something together with the API that would keep your local record up-to-date.

Sorry there isn't a way to do just what you want.

-Samuel