Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking Can't mail graphic files (blue lego block problem)

This is an addition to:

http://www.finetunedmac.com/forums/ubbth...32522#Post32522

When I tried to add a graphic to an email message, I got the blue lego block graphic with a question mark instead of a picture.

With the help of people here, I solved this by first creating a guest account. I created a new Mail message, attached a .jpg, and everything worked fine. Because the problem wasn’t happening in the guest account, I compared the Preferences folder of the guest account with my usual admin account. Fortunately, I only had to get as far as the ByHost folder in my admin account rather than the entire Preferences folder:

Hard Drive>Users>myusername>Library>Preferences>ByHost

I took a screenshot of the list of files (plists) in the guest account's ByHost folder, then compared the files in that list with the files in my admin ByHost folder. I deleted the admin plists which didn’t exist in the guest's By Host folder. Then I restarted. I opened Mail, dragged a .jpg onto a new message, and it worked. Picture appeared in the message.

I don't know exactly which plist of the ones I deleted was causing the problem. Here is a list of the ones I didn't delete (shortened filenames):

com.apple.AddressBook.sync
com.apple.airport.agent
com.apple.Bluetooth
com.apple.iCal.helper
com.apple.mail
com.apple.scheduler

danger, will robinson, danger!

Prefs in byhost are prefs that are tracked separately for different hardware. this is how an ext hdd can boot off several different kinds of macs and track settings for hardware separately. these plists are somewhat notorious for not rebuilding properly if damaged. don't touch them without having a backup handy.

The image cache being bad doesn't sound like something you'd find in byhosts. that looks more like a launchservices database issue. it tracks what happens when you double-click something, but also tracks "document types associated with applications". i.e. it's what draws the blue W sheet image on the Word document instead of just giving it a plain white icon. rebuilding launchservices db is usually the fix for white icons on your desktop or in your folders. this may be related.

you can give it a try. it may not help, but shouldn't be able to break anything either.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/23607344

Too late. I deleted the plists and haven't noticed any problems.

I think Onyx rebuilds the database. If so, I tried it already.