Mail Crashes-Tiger & Panther-must I resort to Entourage (Microsoft-Blah)?!?

Question

I have been a Mac user for 6 years now. In my home we have 3 G4's (eMac, PowerBook & Power Mac) and a G5 on the way. I just bought my Mom, a diehard Windows user until now, a Mac Mini running Tiger 10.4.5. She has had problems with Mail crashing since the first day she got it. She will try to delete certain Junk mail and it crashes. A few times Mail would totally restart from the beginning and I would have to set it up just like the first time it was opened. Loses all e mails in all mailboxes.
Now my wife, who has an eMac G4 running Panther is having similar issues. When deleting e mails the program will simply crash. Then upon restarting Mail it will go back and re-download duplicate messages from the server since it did not get to complete downloading when it crashed. But, as I try to go back to delete the duplicate and junk mail it crashes again. A vicious cycle.
I see so many posts with Mail issues. I thought it was related to Tiger only but it seems that Panther has problems with Mail now as well.
What gives Apple?? Do I need to start using Entourage? Too bad Outlook doesn't run in OS X!! I hate with a passion to have to use a Microsoft program because my Apple programs aren't cutting it.
Peter Mallamo

Answer 1

Peter,
First of all, I have had no crashes, and I know and communicate with many of the contributors to these discussions (those helping vs needing help), and none of us experience these crashes.
With 10.4, problems often come from issues with conversion of mailboxes originating in earlier version of Mail and OSX -- I have not thought that is the case for your mother?
Also with 10.4, it seems to me that for some people the updates have flaws in the installation -- whether this is due to the large size of some updates, and flawed downloads, or from poor practices during the installation of the update, I do not know.
Have you been able to check that the version of Mail is what it should be?
Leaving aside font issues, I think Mail in Panther often encounters problems from mailboxes being Overstuffed, when in long use, and messages with large attachments -- does total individual mailbox size exceeding 500 MB, and approaching 1 GB apply to any of you wife's mailboxes -- Inbox, Sent, other? Are any applications, other than Mail experiencing abnormal behavior?
Can you think of any other info, that might be unique to either your mother or your wife's Macs?
Ernie