Mail keeps quitting about 30 sconds after opening.

Question

4 times yesterday I tried to read my mail. every time it crashed within about half a minute of opening.
I closed down the computer overnight
rebooted this morning
MAil was open ? very strange as I had not opened any apps at all.
then I was running through one folder but about 30 seconds into it mail crashed.
I have messages I need to respond to which are no longer on the server.
10.4.11
I have run disc repair to no avail. It did not find anything to repair then before I could close it it also crashed.
I am sending reports to Apple every time these things happen.
BUt am I in trouble with this machine I have had it since October 2002.
Are there any tasks I should be carrying out to clean things up.
I keep it on most of the week, in sleep mode overnight, does this prevent certain tasks running as I think I read way back in distant past that some tasks run during down time..
I shut it down at least once a week to clean up temp files as my memory was running low at one point and that was a suggestion from someone on these forums.
So PLEASE can someone help.
This is the third problem I have had with my mail program in about the same number of weeks.
I am wondering if they are connected.
I still get one incorrect 'reply from' address when responding to messages on the Sarcoma support group, but that is intermittent.. though drives me crazy as I have to check every time that the address is correct.
All other mail works in the way i expect it to.
Thanks for any help
best wishes
Shirley
At present I have 18.99 GB free space.
I know it is not like windows machines
Mail is version 2.1.3

Answer 1

Hi Shirley,
This is obviously months after your original post and I hope you might have solved it by now, but your subject line really took my eye after extensive searching. Kudos for accurate and useful subject text! This may be way off base in your case but it seems like a very likely scenario for many people, especially the less experienced and so perhaps this may help someone else as well.
I just solved a very similar sounding problem during a visit to my parents and their 20" G4 iMac running OS 10.4.11 and Mail 2.1.3, - in their case the Inbox was extremely large (multiple 100's of messages) since they were not managing their messages over time in any way. Since they never made their own mailbox folders to sort/store messages, nor saved and/or removed attachments (mainly photo jpegs) from the messages, the Inbox was enormous and the indexing procedure could never finish before the fetching process began, - a problem I had read about here in the discussions and hence the crash. Six months passed with my Dad trying to fix things, thrashing and making it even worse, including trashing the working account and ending up with a generic .Mac account with incorrect data, thereby losing access to their messages. Thank God for WebMail.
After trashing the existing generic .Mac account in Mail's Mail menu preferences dialog box (which didn't apply in their case anyway since they have an Earthlink POP), as well as the primary plist file (com.apple.mail.plist) for the account in the User Home>Library>Preferences folder, and simply recreating a new account with all the correct settings, it restored access to all of their existing Mail messages. Then I discovered that being disconnected from their dial-up (or unplugging your high-speed connection's ethernet cable in that case) allowed a successful launch of Mail and access/management of messages in the still-giant Inbox. A modest 50MB of data in their User Home>Library>Mail folder.
I referred to dozens of wonderful posts' suggestions here in the forum to try and solve it, including simply trashing the rebuildable files and plists in the User Home>Library>Mail folder all to no avail, although it never hurts and probably helped in my procedures. But when connected to the internet, it would crash. So, while disconnected, I created a whole bunch of new mailbox folders to move/store desired messages into, down to an Inbox of only 11 messages (from 800+) and that restored proper launch and functionality including sending and getting messages online. However, two of the many mailbox folders I made were still very large (18 & 21 MB) and just selecting them, even if not online, still crashed Mail instantly.
Finally, against all usual advice about not messing with OS X's database format app's data at the Finder level, I quit out of Mail, archived the complete Mail folder in the User Home>Library for safekeeping, then went into it at the Finder level and dragged out the two offending large mailbox folders to the desktop. Mail then launched and still behaved properly without them. Back on the desktop I broke up the two large mailboxes by making several more folders for each, using the same "name.mbox" format as the originals, including a subfolder named Messages for the actual messages and dragged messages out of their original location into the new subfolders until they were all fairly equally sized, 3 to 4MB. Despite not having application-created index, plist, mbox, or table of contents files to reference the moved messages in my new .mbox folders, I imported them all successfully using Mail's menu Import command, and finally got to the task of managing the messages down to a reasonable size. Ultimately we recombined the processed messages back into the original two mailbox folders (still 200 to 300 messages each) and deleted the extras I had made. I have no idea what the threshold level of a mailbox's sheer size is responsible for causing the crashing, but at least it's back to normal, and the desired attachments have all been properly saved to iPhoto or Finder-level storage, or removed using the *Remove Attachments* menu command.
I hope this helps someone out there. I've never had any problems with Mail on my Macs and it's been very unnerving to read about the wealth of different issues people have. Currently I have approx 100 user-made mailbox folders and 212MB of data in my User Home>Library>Mail folder. best regards to everyone,