Mail.app quitting instantly

kolchakkolchak
Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
After years of no problems, I'm suddenly having a serious problem with Mail as of two days ago. It quits almost as soon as it launches, so it's totally unusable. It's not the app itself, since I tried running a copy from my backup partition and it does the same thing, so it has to be one of the routines it calls. Today's Security Update didn't help. Anybody have any ideas on how to fix this without doing an archive and install of Tiger again? If it's going to be tough to repair, I guess I'll wait until 10.4.6 is released and see if that fixes it. Luckily, it's not a high priority since I still have my Powerbook as a backup, where Mail still runs fine.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    electric monkelectric monk Posts: 485member
    I was having the same problem when someone sent me a quicktime movie in an email. When Apple Mail tried loading the message it crashed right off the bat. Since I generally had a couple seconds before it did I managed to delete the movie email after a couple of tries.



    That's the only time I've ever seen Apple Mail just up and quit with nothing else going on.



    Don't know if that helps or not.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    bergermeisterbergermeister Posts: 6,784member
    I had the same, with a message with several large photos. Mail also would not quit properly for a long while, and always had some kind of activity going on. I accessed my account through Safari (.mac) and deleted several large files and the whole problem cleared up. Must have been a corrupted file in the message.
  • Reply 3 of 5
    kolchakkolchak Posts: 1,398member
    Thanks. On the first try to launch, it would run for a second before quitting. Subsequent launches died much faster. Reading that it's likely tied to whatever message it was trying to display, I held down the up key on launch to get it the hell away from that last message. That got it to work. Then I dragged the offending message to the trash and emptied it as quickly as possible. All back to normal.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    bergermeisterbergermeister Posts: 6,784member
    Glad you cleared things up. It is a frustrating problem.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    jwink3101jwink3101 Posts: 739member
    I have had this problem a few times too. Once, i fixed it by using the web-client of the email and deleted a strange email.



    The other times, i just repaired permissions and it worked.
Sign In or Register to comment.