Mail crash when trying to save email message

Question

I installed OS10.5.1 recently and yesterday mail starting crashing whenever I'd try to save an email message ("save as" or shift apple s). Based on one post, I ran a verify and repair disk permissions (from the hard drive, not from the startup disk) but no remedy. The beginning of the crash reports reads: Process: Mail [150]
Path: /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail
Identifier: com.apple.mail
Version: 3.1 (914)
Build Info: Mail-9140000~1
Code Type: PPC (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [85]
Date/Time: 2008-01-18 08:36:00.182 -0600
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.1 (9B18)
Report Version: 6
Exception Type: EXCBADACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERNPROTECTIONFAILURE at 0x00000000bf7fffe0
Crashed Thread: 0
Any ideas on how to repair this would be appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi Farid Shahin.
Verify/repair the startup disk (not just permissions), as described in the following article, in case there is something amiss in the filesystem:
The Repair functions of Disk Utility: what's it all about?
You’d get better results using Eudora Mailbox Cleaner to do the conversion.
Eudora Mailbox Cleaner requires rebuilding the imported mailboxes in Mail afterwards. Instead of rebuilding them one by one, you can re-create the entire index as follows:
1. Quit Mail if it’s running.
2. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail/. Make a backup copy of this folder, just in case something goes wrong, e.g. by dragging it to the Desktop while holding the Option (Alt) key down. This is where all your mail is locally stored.
3. Locate Envelope Index and move it to the Trash. If you see any other “Envelope Index”-named file there, delete it as well.
4. Open Mail. It will tell you that your mail needs to be “imported”. Click Continue and Mail will proceed to re-create Envelope Index — Mail says it’s “importing”, but it just re-creates the index if the mailboxes are already in Mail 2.x format.
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder. That is, ~/Library is the Library folder within the user’s home folder, i.e. /Users/username/Library.