Enable detailed Mail.app logging options

Oct 19, '04 10:47:00AM

Contributed by: blb

This may be nothing more than a simple curiosity to most, unless you're trying to debug some subtle email problems, when some of these settings can become quite useful. Mail.app has a number of settings which allow watching of the activities it is doing. These are set via the defaults command line program (in Terminal); eg, to enable logging of how long Mail.app takes to complete an email address, the command would be

  defaults write com.apple.mail LogAddressCompletionTimes -bool true
To disable, either set it to false:
  defaults write com.apple.mail LogAddressCompletionTimes -bool false
or remove it completely (they default to off, so no setting is as if it is set to false):
  defaults delete com.apple.mail LogAddressCompletionTimes
When any of these are enabled, the output is sent to the console log (use the Console application to view, or look at it via /Library -> Logs -> Console -> console.log. Make sure Mail.app is not running when you change these settings. Other methods can be used to change these (Property List Editor, manually editing the .plist file, etc), but the defaults command is pretty simple for this purpose. If you're truly paranoid, backup the .plist (~/Library -> Preferences -> com.apple.mail.plist) prior to messing around with this (again, do this after you quit Mail.app).

Read the rest of the hint for the full list of defaults options.

The function of many of these is pretty evident from their names, some less so; I've provided descriptions for those I've been able to detect so far. The various settings (this applies to Mail.app 1.3.9v619, as on 10.3.5, so who knows what may happen on earlier and later versions) are:

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