The latest PowerMail release appears to be running O.K. now and doesn't crash when starting.
However, I've found some messages in the System Log that may need looking at for future releases: Dec 5 07:45:23 Thor.local PowerMail[74767]: InitOpenTransportInContext is unimplemented and will be removed soon. Please stop using it. Dec 5 07:48:00 Thor.local PowerMail[74767]: -[ABGroup valueForProperty:note] - unknown property. This warning will be displayed only once per unknown property, per session. -- Geoff using PowerMail 6.2.1 build 4668 on Mavericks

