Apple Mail not opening, says opening Table of contents, but I get nothing..

Question

I often have problems getting my Apple Mail to open. It just says "Reading table of contents" and doesn't open. Sometimes after numerous Forced Quits it opens. When doing a Forced Quit, it sometimes says "Not Responding".
Is there anything that I can do to get Apple Mail to work? Or, is there anything else out there that works better that Apple Mail that I can download off the net?
I am running OS 10.3.9

Answer 1

Still not sure what you mean. Anyway, if there are no filesystem issues, the procedure to fix the problem for the Inbox of a POP account would be as follows. I cannot be more specific with the information you’ve provided (actually, I don’t even know whether the affected mailbox is one of the Inboxes or it’s something else):
1. Quit Mail if it’s running.
2. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail/POP-username@mailserver/.
3. Locate INBOX.mbox and move it to the Desktop.
4. Open Mail. A new empty INBOX.mbox will automatically be created within the account folder, and this will allow you to continue using Mail normally while trying to solve the problem.
Although INBOX.mbox appears to be a file, it’s actually a special kind of folder (a package) that contains several files. Ctrl-click on INBOX.mbox and choose Show Package Contents from the contextual menu to see the files it contains. Of these files, mbox is the most important and is where all your messages are stored. What’s the size of that file? Depending on its size, you may or may not be able to directly import it back into Mail in the next step.
An Incoming_Mail file may also be present, in which case it might contain messages that Mail couldn’t transfer to mbox. Incoming_Mail is also a standard mbox file like mbox proper, just named differently, and can be imported back into Mail in the same way.
5. In Mail, do File > Import Mailboxes and follow the instructions to import the INBOX.mbox that’s on the Desktop. I’m not sure what the import options available in Mail 1.x are, but you should choose Other / Standard mbox or something like that, so that Mail looks at the mbox file only (and Incoming_Mail, if present) and ignores the other files in the package.
If Mail doesn’t let you select INBOX.mbox in step 5 because it’s a package instead of a plain folder, rename INBOX.mbox to just INBOX (i.e. remove the .mbox suffix) so that it becomes a normal folder, and try again. You cannot do this directly in the Finder because removing a suffix by normal means causes the Finder to hide the suffix instead of renaming the file. To remove the suffix from the name, you must do File > Get Info (⌘I) on the file and change the name there.
Do with the imported mail whatever you wish. You may move the messages anywhere you want and get rid of the imported mailboxes afterwards, but take a look at the following article, in case there is something there that applies to you:
Overstuffed mailbox is unexpectedly empty
If all is well and you don’t miss anything, the files on the Desktop can be deleted, although you may want to keep them for a while, just in case.
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder, i.e. ~/Library is the Library folder within the user’s home folder.