Mail crashes everytime i hit send

Question

II also lost all my addresses yesterday but was able to recoup them from back up.
emac   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

I think you would agree that this is not
the most effective workflow.
No, it isn't, indeed . OK, so here's what you must do to get rid of all the junk-related files in Mail:
1. Quit Mail.
2. In the Finder, go to HOME/Library/Mail/.
3. Locate LSMMap2 and move it to the Trash.
4. Locate MessageRules.plist and move it to the Desktop. If there is a file called MessageRules.plist.backup, move it to the Desktop too. You may also see MessageSorting.plist files there. This is where Mail stored the rules in Panther, and they are no longer used in Tiger, so just move them to the Trash if you see them.
5. Look for the account folders. The name of each account folder starts with the account type (POP, IMAP, Mac), followed by the account username and the incoming mail server. Open each of the account folders, locate the Junk.mbox folders and move these to the Trash. Note: As a result of doing this, all mail automatically marked as junk by Mail will be lost. If there is a chance that you have legit messages there and you want to preserve them, move them to another mailbox in Mail first.
6. Launch Mail. Go to Mail > Preferences > Junk Mail, enable junk filtering again, and configure it however you wish. You may want to shut down the Internet connection before launching Mail to prevent it from downloading anything until the junk mail filter has been enabled.
If the above solves the problem and you don't have any rules you'd like to preserve or recreating them is not a daunting task, just delete the MessageRules.plist files that were moved to the Desktop and be done with it.
BTW, are you really using Mac OS X 10.4.2? Is there a reason you haven't updated your system?