For some reason this earlier message didn't appear onlist for me, nor do I have any testers inquiring. I'm hoping the message disappeared, so I resend it here:
I managed to isolate one specific message and discovered that this message CAN BE RENDERED in Mail! So there's no system level problem! It's PowerMail! Also, there's NO SPAMSIEVE involved! It's the rendering. I also tried importing this message into a new fresh otherwise empty database under a new user. Same crash! Next step is to check if this is true also on other Mac OS X machines. If not I'll check fonts etc on my machine. Stay tuned. Any volunteers for testing this specific message on their machines? In a new database of course, carefully evaluating the results. Initial message supplied as background: > >Since june this year I've been in a recurring battle with the gremlins >of email that for some reason, which seem to involve rendering of asian >fonts, appeared in many many spam messages in one of my email accounts. >I'm assuming the messages are asian langu >age spam. I've no way of telling for sure what's going on. > >What's worse is that beside making a backup prior to every email fetch - >and accepting all real messages will be lost unless they are saved on >the server, which cause other problems (see my concerns since a few >years) -there's no way to recover the DB. It >just won't help to rebuild, not even deep rebuild. On start, just when >the main window is drawn it crashes. > >Anyway, as a crash seems inevitable in this account I can't live with >this situation any longer. For the time being I'm connecting and >deleting all spam messages by hand instead, but this is quite tedious >and if I make the mistake to check this account eve >n once I lose my DB again. > >The earlier crashes was recovered with PowerMail Salvage, but while it's >great I get the messages back its operation also takes time and fusing >the (newly arrived) recovered messages with a backup of the DB creates a >long line of problem, including umlauts > being destroyed beyond recovery and also bring an element of >uncertainty to the removal of unavoidable duplicate messages (which I >have an applescript that does). > >I have not reported this to CTM as doing so and volunteering to bug test >and look for probable causes seems to be a futile action, for my range >of problems at least. > >What I'm planning to do is closing the account since 6 years. But what I >do when these types of email hit my other accounts? What other choice do >I have beside abandoning PowerMail? Unless this problem is stopped now, >this is what I'm looking at and if so >chances are this problem may affect all of you sooner or later. > >I do realize that chances are that if SpamSieve was better at catching >these messages they wouldn't even show up in the inbox, which seems to >be when they crash. But I would still crash when I looked over what >SpamSieve had put in the spam folder and in th >e trash. Meaning I would risk losing real messages, which needless to >say is unacceptable.
