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Use Mail.app without performing pending operations
Authored by: webdevtool on May 04, '10 02:02:07PM

EXCELLENT! Thank you, all. This was the solution to two days' failed googling.

Issue (stuffed with keywords for the next guy's googling):
I inadvertently tried to send a 46 MB attachment (a large attachement that was over the server's size limits) using Mail.app on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, via Gmail.

When Gmail bounced my email for violating the attachment size limit, for whatever reason, Mail.app on my macbook just kept trying. It stayed in my cache somehow, and kept trying to send or store in my drafts or something... regardless, suddenly in Mail.app, I had new folders... like "On My Mac" under Trash, or "On My Mac" right on the root, which contained another new folder "Recovered". In Recovered there were hundreds of copies of this email, attachment and all... and still trying to send more... or copy... or whatever.

Well, sooner or later I hit google's bandwidth limits. In Mail.app I got the following error popup:
"The server returned the error: Account exceeded bandwidth limits. (Failure)"

I noticed that my iPhone mail client failed as well, with bad username or password error.

I found references to deleting the hidden super-duper-secret mail cache:
~/Library/Mail/IMAP-<username>@domain.tld@imap.domain.tld/.OfflineCache

but Apple is so gracious to protect the users from their computers, I was never able to figure out how to pull this off. Terminal is so DOS I could barf. (As a mainly Windows guy, I find owning my first mac to be hardly the Come On Over long-term conversion the ads sell; macs just work - but I digress.)

Thankfully, if I'm going to *NEED* a script to delete a file on my computer, well, at least it was here. Note: on my macbook, the applescript editor is in /Applications/Utilities/...blah blah.. you left off the Utilities folder.

Now I've unclogged my bandwidth (google kicks you for 24 hours) and deleted all this junk from mail.app and it's all working again. Thanks for the script! It will live in my Documents folder forever.



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