this is the third one I've ran into so I'ma assuming it's a common issue. Customer runs an OS update (10.5.8? security? I don't know) and now mail loads, opens the main viewer and looks normal, and then crashes about 5 sec later.
The fix is to open (home)/Library/ and rename Mail to Mail2 and relaunch Mail. It should say "welcome to the new mail" and click Continue to migrate your account, which it will do. Then it will try to download the last few weeks of your inbox.
When that finishes, quit Mail, go back to (home)/Library and rename (the newly created) Mail to Mail3, and rename Mail2 back to Mail. Relaunch Mail. Should be all better now.
I presume it's having issues migrating the account itself and the account data at the same time. This forces the account settings to be fixed separately (mail preferences) before it tries to access the actual Mail data.
You can also delete the Mail3 folder.
Last edited by dianne; 11/15/11 12:50 AM. Reason: moved from the Mac OS X 10.0 - 10.5.x forum to Networking.
