On 25/03/2009, at 11:05 PM, Robert Howells wrote:
Hi Ian
Can you go to your desktop , find the copy of Mail you would have
put there
when I asked you previously
highlight it and then do an Apple plus I
this should give you an information window which will show
what size the folder is .
Hopefully , plenty of Megabytes -- then tell us what size it is ,
please
I can now contribute usefully to this discussion - well perhaps not
usefully, but I can at least explain exactly what Ian is going
through.
I visited Ian's place today at his request and saw for myself just
what is happening. It is truly bizarre:
1. Mail does launch, but Message Viewer does not automatically
open.
2. Message View can be called up from the Window Menu, but no
messages
are displayed. There is a full contingent of custom mailboxes listed
in the sidebar, complete with unread message counts. When the
mailboxes are selected, no messages are seen. A look inside ~/
Library/
Mail/ shows that all the mailboxes are intact and all the mbox files
and messages are there.
3. Mail does not respond to the Quit command. Force Quit is the only
way out, and of course the new account details that Ian
painstakingly
enters each time are lost because the preferences are not updated.
4. I deleted com.apple.mail.plist. This simple act alone should be
enough to cause Mail to call for a new account to be set up. Not at
all in this case. Mail simply launches the same way: no Message
Viewer, no messages, and an old iPrimus account listed in the
Accounts
preferences.
5. Deleting com.apple.mail.plist, all Mail cache files and any other
Mail-related file I can find makes no difference. Mail continues to
behave in exactly the same way. Of course, a new version of
com.apple.mail.plist is automatically created, but is clearly being
ignored by Mail, which continues to show the settings for this old
iPrimus account. It must be reading this stuff from somewhere, but
just where it a total mystery.
6. Perhaps something has gone wrong with Mail itself (maybe
something
weird has crept into the Mail package), so lets try reverting to
last
week's copy, which was the one running before this stuff started
happening. We went back to last Thursday and restored Mail.app via
Time Machine. No difference.
Short of performing a complete System Restore, I can't see how to
resolve this. A Clean Install with Archive is likely to be
unsuccessful, since it is apparent that the problem is local to
Ian's
user account. I have searched for hidden files containing the word
"mail" in the filename. I admit I'm out of ideas. Perhaps some of
what
I have outlined above might ring a bell with someone on the list. At
the moment I have Ian running his old Entourage X software, so at
least he can handle email in a comfortable way again, but it's not
really addressing the central problem. For the moment I think it's
worth waiting for 10.5.7 in the hope that an updated Mail program
might resolve things. If not, It will be time for that backup and
full
system restore, I'm thinking.
Very strange indeed.
All contributions gratefully accepted.
--
Peter Hinchliffe Apwin Computer Services
FileMaker Pro Solutions Developer
Perth, Western Australia
Phone (618) 9332 6482 Fax (618) 9332 0913
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