Mail crashes on message with bad HTML. How to delete or fix ?

Question

Hello all,
I've got a strange problem with Mail crashing when reading a particular message that appears to have some bad HTML. Here's the story:
I received an email conatining HTML. Mail displays the message just fine, but when I try to navigate away from the message (to the next message for example), Mail crashes. Anything I do after reading the message causes Mail to crash. I can't delete the message or move it to another folder without a crash.
The worst part is that everytime I restart Mail it defaults to displaying this message -- so now it is stuck in a loop !
I have deleted the message from the mail server (through webmail) so it has not affected Mail on my other computers, but I need to figure out how to delete it locally from this one. I dug around in the ~\Library\Mail folder and I can see the files for this account, but I can't figure out how to delete this particular message without deleting ALL my other messages -- I've got older mail that I still want to keep.
How can I manually delete this individual message, without removing everything else ?
Is there another way to "reset" Mail so it doesn't default to this message every time ? Maybe then I could delete it from within Mail.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
I hope a future update to Mail will fix this HTML problem. The same pages crashes Safari too....
Regards,
JN
G5 Dual 2GHz   Mac OS X (10.4.9)   MacBook

Answer 1

Hello John.
You can launch Mail holding the Shift key down until the main window appears to prevent it from selecting any mailboxes or loading any messages upon start up.
And there are at least three ways to select a message and delete it without displaying its contents:
(1) You can hide the preview pane by dragging the separator bar between the message list and the preview pane to the bottom of the window, or by just double-clicking within the separator bar, so that the preview pane disappears and only the message list is visible. To make the preview pane visible again, drag the separator bar up from the bottom of the window, or just double-click on the separator bar again.
(2) If you select the message with the mouse, the message is displayed in the preview pane when the mouse button is released, not when it’s pressed. This allows you to drag the message to the Trash or to any other mailbox without Mail trying to display its contents.
(3) Ctrl-clicking on a message causes a contextual menu to appear, from which you can usually (but not always, don’t ask me why) choose Delete or Move To, before the contents of the message are displayed in the preview pane.