Rainbow ball and replying to mail

Question

Some of the messages I receive on the laptop I want to answer. I use the reply button and when I do the rainbow ball is spinning and I have to force quit to get back to mail. Does any one know the answer? It affects my Mac Pro Laptop many times, it doesn't seem to be the same on my G4 tower any suggestions greatly appreciated.
Roger

Answer 1

It's not a functional "fix" at this point so much as on the checklist of items in the process of variable elimination.
I built a "flattened" mac, that is on a clean empty hard-drive, I built a system from scratch using the 10.4 dvd, then did the necessary software updates to bring it up to date, and NOTHING ELSE, no third party software, nothing. I checked and verified the filesystem integrity and permissions via diskutils (the command line equivalent of the disk utility) from the console (>console in the login window) as root. (yes I enabled root.)
I then made a complete bootable mirror copy of the drive in it's "pristine" condition using the ASR tools (another command line tool set provided by apple that us command-line junkies love).
I also archived the the mail.app in it's pristine condition.
I then configured the mail client to work with my home account. And then made another archive, just of the the ~/Library/Mail and ~/Library/preferences directories, so that I could later compare them to their counterparts when things went south.
I then started using the account and mail.app, "heavily". And within a few days it started acting funky. I then started doing some comparisons about the state of the files in the "pristine" archive and the "sustpect" installed system, didn't see a connection. Did some tracing of the I/O of mail.app, to figure out what it was doing and why, and that led me to compare specifically the signatures and rules settings before and after, and amoung the text files I saw no difference, and I didn't compare the .webarchive files that mail.app uses for storing signatures.
So I archived the "suspect" directories (mentioned above) and replaced them with the "pristine" versions, and things worked swell again.
So now I am in the process of narrowing down what specific files are susepct of causing the problems and hopefully how and why they become problematic. When I do, I will post my results here. I am doing this as time and inclination is availible, and that time is limited. I hope to have a functional solution for at least my self by the end of the week (PDT) even if that "functional" solution is to not use the signatures or rules or junkmail facilities or something like that may work for me. I would rather have a functionally restricted, but reliable mail.app, than have to deal with a lessor client at this point.
So the three things I would first yank (just move to a safe place, don't destroy) from your ~/Library/Mail/ directory if you are having similar problems are ~/Library/Mail/Signatures/ and ~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist and ~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist.backup and reconstruct those settings in the mail app, by hand. If the problems go away...
Just stop the application, and move those files, and then move the replacements in, and relaunch the mail application. If you don't have "pristine" replacements, you will need to construct and archive copies of them first using the process mentioned above.
I have eliminated the DefaultCounts, and Envelope Index files as sources of the problems I am (personally) experienceing, that's not to say they aren't the problem in your case, both can become corrupted, and I have reports that some users within my circle of awareness find that mail.app reliability issues that were cured by removing those files and letting the app rebuild them fresh on occasion.
G4 500x2 2Gb ram   Mac OS X (10.4.8)