Messages - An internal Messages error occurred.

Unfortunately this did not solve the problem for me. For more details on this situation if you, also, are continuing to have the problem after trying the suggestions here, please check out the further discussion here:

Re: Error message when trying to open Messages.

Your thoughts and contributions there are welcome.

try right click on messages and set it to offline before launching it.

Then go online.

Hi. Not clear on where this setting is, or where you mean to right-click on messages.

Right-clicking on messages.app allows access to "info" etc., but no "offline" setting there. Would you mind sort of walking us through your proposed solution?

Thank you.

James

my apologies, I was being shamfully unclear.

move Messages.app onto the dock, then right click on the icon off the dock. then set 'My Status'

hope it helps!

Not at all, but with Messages installed on the dock, right clicking on my MBP running Mountain Lion 10.8.1, the options presented don't include "My Status." Maybe you are running a different version of OS X?

I see this:

New Message

Options -> Remove From Dock / Show in Finder / Open at Login / Assign to: All Desktops / This Desktop / None

Show Recents

Open

Perhaps I am overlooking something obvious?

Thanks,

James

i am currently running 10.8.1 mac osx mountain lion as well.

now I am very confused...

hmm by all means, have you ever tried and uncheck this in its preference: 'When I quit messages, change my status to offline'?

codefish46,

From that other conversation, I *did* find something that worked!

Open Activity Monitor in Application/Utilities

Find the item IMAgent

Highlight it and use the Quit Button top left

Confirm Force Quit

(It will relaunch right away)

Restart Messages.

So that's awesome… we'll see if it's repeatable but at least it worked once. Nice!

-Joseph

OK, it's not settled.

I am still getting the error message once and a while.

Joseph, doesn't the program give you the option of quitting when you get the error message after startup?

James,

It does, and that will quit Messages, but that dialog will come up for every launch until I change something. This often happens after a restart, so just restarting again doesn't help. Last time it happened I did the quit-IMAgent-trick and that worked; we'll see if it works next time it happens.

-Joseph

The problem is that you need to add Message to your allowed internet access programs in firewall.

Will, that was one of the first things I tried and it didn't help unfortunately. I'm on 10.8.2 now and haven't seen this issue in a while, so perhaps it's been addressed?

-Joseph

The problem came back today; haven't seen it in a while so I had hopes that 10.8.2 had fixed it, but apparently not.

The good news is that the trick from the other forum of locating imagent in Activity Monitor and quitting that worked perfectly. Quit it, it'll relaunch atuomatically, then Messages will launch fine.

Tha'ts two for two… I'm calling it a solution 😉 A crap one obviously, but at least it works.

I just spent the last 20 minutes trying to figure out how to write an applescript to kill the imagent process but failed. If anyone out there knows how to do this, this'd be a handy thing to keep in the dock for just such occasions.

cheers

-Joseph

Hi guys, Sorry to fire up an old thread.

Im having the same issue, I have reinstalled mountain lion. Ran a repair disk permissions, repair disk via target disk mode, rebuilt the directory using diskwarrior, tested on a blank admin account (same issue, so it must be at the root level rather then user level), and replaced all the .plist files relating to iMessage and iChat etc with ones from my Mac Air that works. I also dont have that IMAgent running in activity monitor said earlier to kill but that is on my Mac Air...wondering if it hasnt got something to do with that?? But short of formatting and dragging my stuff back on without using migration assistant or time machine is there anything else i can try?

far as i can tell imagent isnt on my computer. Im getting a imagent crash report in console...