I dont know why you would want to delete the application only to reinstall it, but I think you could just trash it and then reinstall it from the installation DVD's that came with your mac. If you want to get deeper into it, you could install appzapper or cleanapp to remove it then reinstall from there.
Mail is one of the applications you can re-install separately from your 10.5 disk. This is for 10.4 but the same is true for 10.5
Custom installs in Mac OS X 10.4.
If you delete Users/Home/Library/Mail you will lose all your email. If you do delete Users/Home/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist you will lose all your email account settings and general mail preferences.
When I upgraded to Leopard, I could not get Mail to work. I deleted all the account info I had and reloaded it, but the two issues I ran into were:
1. Mail would only download one file, and then "hang".
2. You could not quit mail, you had to force quit
so... I tried deleting both the mail preferences in the library, as well as the users/home/library preferences. Neither solved the issue.
My issue with using time machine to back up everything was that because something there is corrupt, I did NOT want to back up a corrupt file. So what I did was I loaded Leopard to my external drive and booted from that. I then copied mail from that drive to my hard drive.
While I was booted from the external, I set up mail, and everything worked perfectly! But when I booted from the hard drive, I still had the same issue. I again tried deleting both preference files. I tried launching Mail from the external. I tried copying the preferences from the external and pasting them to the hard drive Bottom line: if I boot from the external, everything works fine. If I boot from the hard drive, Mail hangs.
So right now, my two choices are to always boot from my external (bad) to only using Thunderbird (worse). I'm quite open to suggestions. Absolute backup is to clear the hard drive and start over. I'm hoping for something easier than that first.
So there must be a preferences file I'm missing somewhere.
I actually reinstalled it using Pacifist from
http://www.charlessoft.com/ which works great.
I also deleting the plist file but I still having the same problem.
frustrating like ****. Basically, I just can't receive emails. it's just spinning forever but not receiving any emails.
I got entourage working great but Mail not and I just prefer Mail.
I Googled "apple reinstall mail" and stumbled upon this discussion. I am amazed that you are having the exact same problem I am having. Mail begins to download, and then it "hangs" on a message. It's a different message every time, though, so I know it's not an issue with one of the emails. By the way, the issue only happens for my Yahoo! email account. Gmail and .mac work just fine. (Oh, and web-based Yahoo! email works fine, too.) I'm curious: when did this start happening for you all? My issue began on 16 May. Haven't been able to get a message via Yahoo! since then.
I'm having the same problem with Mail, and it started last week. Hopefully someone will come up with a solution so we don't have to wipe our hard drives to use Mail.
I have been force quitting mail for months now - I've tried deleting plists, deleting mail accounts and all sort of various suggestions with no luck. I just tried renaming my MAIL folder and it worked - my mail now quits. I only lost my Rules and RSS feeds but I can live with that. I'm so pleased.
Many thanks 🙂