Recover from a crashing Mail.app

Nov 09, '01 09:16:10AM

Contributed by: robg

Yesterday, after the Aqua window server unexpectedly quit (due to some combinaton of Classihack, XDarwin 1.0.4.1, xchat, and the GIMP, I think) -- which drops you instantly back to the login screen (ouch!) -- I couldn't get Mail.app to run anymore. I'd start it up, the window would start displaying, and then it would quit. I've been using Mail for over a year, and this was the first real problem I'd had with it.

I tried all the 'usual' stuff. Trashed the prefs. Emptied my POP email via another program. Moved all my mailboxes out of the path. Booted in OS 9 and ran Disk First Aid. Booted single user and ran 'fsck -y'. Even copied a Mail.app from a known working system. Nothing worked. So I went looking for help, and found this thread on the MacFixIt forums. Turns out that three of us had the exact same problem yesterday!

On someone's suggestion, I tried logging in as another user, and was quite surprised to find that Mail.app ran perfectly. About the same time, I received a response from the X4U mailing list with the solution to the problem. Somehow, my ~/Library/Addresses folder had been damaged (probably by the Aqua crash). By moving this folder out to the desktop, I was able to run Mail as my normal user again. All three of us in the forum stumbled onto the solution at about the same time last night :-).

Now the only remaining question is if there's any way to recover some of the address book information. Probably not, but I'm going to investigate a bit more today.

-rob.

Comments (1)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20011109091610836