Corrupted POP account crashing Mail in Leopard

Thank you for your suggestion.

At the risk of sounding ungrateful: I'm trying VERY hard not to have to re-create all eight existing e-mail accounts, their multiple SMTP authentications and other tedious details that would be required if I trash the pref file.

Is there some way to just address the problem POP account and not gamble trying to precisely re-create all the other account details?

Thanks again,

Tim

Hi Ernie -

Thanks for your help with this. I've managed to maintain the status quo after deleting and rebuilding the offending POP account. Everything's shiny and new, but even the new account's crashing the Mail app when it's seeking mail.

I'm not sure where to go next. I may try to clear all existing messages from the email server in case there's a corrupted file Mail's trying to download. Any further thoughts? Maybe some pref file I can clear with Console?

Thanks again,

Tim

When I deleted the account yesterday, the whole thing did disappear from the mail folder. All the other accounts worked fine in its absence. All the other accounts worked fine when I created the new account, too.

I created a new user ("Cleaner!") and re-created the problem account. It downloaded the messages without any trouble.

You wrote:
"If you were to quit Mail and delete MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded3, then Mail would again download any messages that still exist on the servers for all accounts for the second time, but there would then be a new MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded3 file created. The test with the New User Account will help us know if this action is possibly needed."

I'm looking in the home/library/mail folder and seeing multiple MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded. The current one ends in 3, but there is one ending in 2 (circa 2007) and one with no numeral at the end (circa 2005). Any chance these three are competing for Mail's affection?

Also, I deleted the only remaining Smart mailbox as someone else suggested based on the latest crash log. I wasn't using the folder anymore anyway. Deleting that folder and re-started had no apparent effect.

Thanks,

Tim

You wrote:

"I would fear that the corruption of the MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded3 would not now be repaired by deleting them, but you can safely try that."

Is the "MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded3" file something that I can move to the desktop, re-start and have Mail app auto regenerate? I certainly wouldn't mind some dupe downloaded messages if it fixes the problem.

Tim

Forcing the new MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded and removing the extraneous ones did not make any difference.

I decided to just re-create the account as an IMAP rather than POP so I could at least download new mail. Now I have the existing POP account and its years of sent and received mail. Unfortunately, I have to keep it offline so it doesn't check for new mail and crash the Mail app.

Any way to marry these two accounts and thus preserve all the sent/received/draft messages in the original POP account with the new IMAP account that can actually receive messages without crashing?

I certainly appreciate your continuing efforts on this front. Judging by the other threads, I'm not alone in this new crash pattern.

Thanks,

Tim

"Very early in this topic I explain how to remove the old account folder, and then Import its mailboxes (after renaming a bit) to be On My Mailboxes accessible in the Sidebar. Once that is done, you can Move those messages back to any current account mailbox, such as Inbox or Sent. Was there something you did not understand about doing that?"

Unfortunately, I spent most of yesterday doing just that. I ended up not having all my email transfer - in some cases in was as few as 99 out of a 1,000 messages. The process seems imperfect, and it took a mixture of importing and re-importing mboxes and OS X Mail options in sequence to actually coax all the existing mail back.

"I suspect that the proper way to have proceeded was purging the com.apple.mail.plist all along. I can assure you from much experience that there are numerous instances where that is the real solution to such crashes, but you were reluctant to do that. I still would advise doing that, since corruption in any area we have discussed could result in a corruption of that plist file, and purging is often the only solution. Your test result with a New User Account is also an indicator of needing to purge and freshen the com.apple.mail.plist file."

My reluctance stems from prior nightmares trying to retrieve archival and current email after rebuilding com.apple.mail.plist files in earlier versions of Mail. My experience yesterday solidified that fear. If Apple had some retrieval / rebuild utility that matched the current numbers of messages from any given account (including draft, sent, inbox, etc.) and then came up with the same numbers of re-imported messages on the other end, I'd have a lot more confidence in the process. Instead, I went from 1,024 existing messages to 623 after re-creating the account.

Believe me, I'm very appreciative of your attention, but wiping out years worth of messages with very little expectation of ever getting the full complement back is daunting. I'm going to re-investigate Mail Steward and (one hopes) find a more stable way to archive important email outside the Mail app structure.

For now, I'll take your advice about dragging all the existing messages from the POP account and dragging them to their respective places in the new IMAP account. (I asked my most recent question because I've read elsewhere that dragging files from POP to IMAP accounts often results in incomplete transfers.)

I apologize if it seems I'm ungrateful and unwilling to take good advice. I've had more problems with Leopard than the past two iterations of OS X combined, and I'm annoyed by having to waste three full days trying to fix this 10.5.2 gremlin.

Thanks again,

Tim