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Launch Mail with no mailbox selected Apps
I subscribe to CNET's Morning Dispatch, which is delivered in HTML format. Sometimes when I select the message, the content is blank. In those cases, I can click on another message and then return to the CNET message, which will then display properly.

Today, however, Mail started crashing when I try to display the current CNET message. I then tried to view yesterday's CNET message in the Trash, and Mail crashed again. On relaunch, Mail was trying to display yesterday's message in the trash, and crashing before I could do anything. This happened once last week, and I had to restore ~/Library/Mail/ from my nightly backup. Today, I went looking for another solution.

I tried relaunching Mail again, but this time, I held down the Shift key as it launched. To my surprise, Mail opened with no mailbox selected, and everything seemed to be OK after that.

[robg adds: As far as I can tell, this isn't documented, but it works perfectly -- and is much better than the solution I used when I had a 'crasher' email in my inbox. In that case, I used the Terminal to edit the Mail files directly and remove the offending message.]
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Launch Mail with no mailbox selected | 3 comments | Create New Account
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Launch Mail with no mailbox selected
Authored by: kirkmc on Dec 18, '05 02:16:13AM

It does work fine, but, in case of problem, couldn't you just go into ~/Library/Mail and remove the offending message from the Outbox after quitting Mail?

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Launch Mail with no mailbox selected
Authored by: sjk on Dec 18, '05 02:50:14AM

The message causing the crash while trying to display was in the Trash, not the Outbox. But maybe you could grovel around in ~/Library/Mail looking for a crash-causing message to delete in whatever mailbox it's in, unless it's on an IMAP server without a cached local copy that's causing the crash. Regardless, this hint seems like it provides a more convenient method than fussing with ~/Library/Mail, especially if you have to talk someone through the process.



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Launch Mail with no mailbox selected
Authored by: codeman38 on Dec 28, '05 05:09:16PM

I've had this same problem with some e-mails from GoDaddy about my domain name registration... they'd preview fine after Mail.app was already launched, but if they were the message selected when Mail.app was loading, they would produce an instant crash, without even showing a Crash Reporter dialog (which the solution on Apple's site required).

I had 'solved' it by mucking about with the contents of my ~/Library/Mail folder... but this solution is so much easier!



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