Mail won't stop trying to send!

Question

I tried to send a short video and I guess it was not a valid format for mail to send in or it was to big? But now everytime I open up mail it automatically tries to send and send (volleyball spinning) until it stops and abruptly quits the whole program. Of course while the spinning is going on I can't get into the drafts folder, where I believe the vid is, to delete it. I can't move the coursor, can't get into preferences, or into any other app at all untill the spinning stops and the app quits by itself. Because of this I can't use mail so I got so frustrated that I eventually just deleted the whole app and told myself I would just reinstall it. Instead of reinstalling the whole OS I used a shareware program called Pacifist which lets you install specific apps from the DVD. I finally installed mail again and once again to my demise it open up and immediately started to try to send or got caught up on this "bad file" froze and finally quits like always. I've done disc repair, I've gone to my mailboxes on the web and tried to delete this file or whatever it is and it's not on my web mail. Webmail works fine but everytime I open up mail it does the same thing. Basically i can't use it. Is there a way to have mail stop trying to send/recieve/read files so I can delete whatever is keeping the Volleyball spinning or I'll just be fine deleting all of my e-mail and starting all over again with a bare bones mail app? Please help!

Answer 1

Any message that isn't successfully sent remains in the Outbox mailbox and this is why the Mail.app continues to try to send it when re-launched.
With the Mail.app quit and using the Finder, go to Home > Library > Mail > Mailboxes > Outbox.mbox.
The Outbox.mbox represents "Out" in the mailboxes drawer and is shared by all accounts.
Delete the Outbox.mbox and empty the Trash. This will delete the problem message.
Launch Mail and a new Outbox.mbox will be created automatically by Mail within the Mailboxes folder and this should resolve the problem.
Since you re-installed the Mail.app from your Panther install discs using Pacifist and unless your Panther install discs include 10.3.9, you need to download the 10.3.9 Combo Update and re-install 10.3.9 to get the Mail.app to the current version as of 10.3.9 if your OS version details are accurate.
What was or is the size of this video attachment?
All email attachments must be encoded before the message is sent which increases the size of the pre-encoded file. The Mail.app uses MIME 1.0 for attachment encoding which is the internet standard. As a general rule, MIME encoded binary file attachments are approximately 150% of the size of the original pre-encoded file. If the pre-encoded size of this video file was/is 5 MB, the encoded size will be roughly 7.5 MB or even larger.