On 26/03/2009, at 10:42 PM, Peter Hinchliffe wrote:
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
As a Macintouch reader I found this tonight :-
<http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/leopard/index.html#d25mar2009>
Specifically the message about updating to 10.5.6
Bob
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