Mail.app a Mess

Makosuke · Oct 28, 2003

Well, my Panther install (or rather, simultaneous Archive Upgrade from 10.2.6 and transfer to a new G5) went nearly flawlessly. Except that mail is freaking out severely:

It'll launch, and get mail, and all my old mail is there, but clicks seem to "miss"--a click will register well below or to the side of where I'm actually clicking, and the location changes randomly on every re-launch. Command-key commands also seem to fail, although the menus work.

Every action is accompanied in the Console by a slew of "Invalid message sent to event NSEvent" errors.

I've already tried repairing permissions, and I've also noticed that it works fine in a different user's account (also upgraded), leading me to believe that it's some sort of corrupt preference error.

Anybody seen something like this before, or maybe have a suggestion for things to try and delete?

tduality · Oct 28, 2003

Re: Mail.app a Mess

Originally posted by Makosuke
Well, my Panther install (or rather, simultaneous Archive Upgrade from 10.2.6 and transfer to a new G5) went nearly flawlessly. Except that mail is freaking out severely:

It'll launch, and get mail, and all my old mail is there, but clicks seem to "miss"--a click will register well below or to the side of where I'm actually clicking, and the location changes randomly on every re-launch. Command-key commands also seem to fail, although the menus work.

Every action is accompanied in the Console by a slew of "Invalid message sent to event NSEvent" errors.

I've already tried repairing permissions, and I've also noticed that it works fine in a different user's account (also upgraded), leading me to believe that it's some sort of corrupt preference error.

Anybody seen something like this before, or maybe have a suggestion for things to try and delete?

I saw the same error message with Safari, which didn't accept any key strokes any more. Mail crashed everytime I tried to add a sender to the Address Book.

I finally made a clean install which resolved the problems for Safari and made Mail more responsive. Haven't tested Mail much yet.

Makosuke · Oct 28, 2003

Re: Re: Mail.app a Mess

Originally posted by tduality
I finally made a clean install which resolved the problems for Safari and made Mail more responsive. Haven't tested Mail much yet.

That's not encouraging, since I've got so many customized prefs that I'm not going to clean install unless I'm absolutely desperate. Guess I'm going to be doing some experimentation till I figure something out.

So far all I've determined is that it's not as a result of the data files in the Application Support folder, since removing the whole thing didn't help at all.

The com.apple.mail Prefs, maybe...?

Thirteenva · Oct 28, 2003

Here's what I did when I had a preference issue with safari and wasn't sure what files to delete for that particular app. (there are multiple)

Make sure no apps are running.

Go to preferences folder move all preferences to a different folder. (moved mine to a folder on my desktop.

now your preferences folder is empty.

start up the problem app, in my case it was safari, in your case its mail. It will create the preference files that are missing.

now copy your preference files back to your preference folder, when prompted to overwrite select NO.

by doing this you obviously will lose any custom mail preference settings. However if it works you'll have alleviated your major issue.

It worked for me with safari.

primalman · Oct 28, 2003

In mail you can also rebuild the mailbox....look in the Mailbox menu, helped me out.

tduality · Oct 29, 2003

Re: Re: Re: Mail.app a Mess

Originally posted by Makosuke
That's not encouraging, since I've got so many customized prefs that I'm not going to clean install unless I'm absolutely desperate. Guess I'm going to be doing some experimentation till I figure something out.

So far all I've determined is that it's not as a result of the data files in the Application Support folder, since removing the whole thing didn't help at all.

The com.apple.mail Prefs, maybe...?

I think a clean install is definitely something to consider. Comparing with my upgrade install Panther appears now much faster. There certainly was a problem in the upgrade.

With a little bit of effort I recovered of preferences/data from application my wife and me needs immediately (Mail, Safari, Address Book, OpenOffice, eclipse, MenuMeters) and will now go now without any hurry through the rest. More often than not I decide not to install some of the applications again. Kind of spring cleaning in late November. It sure depends on how much stuff you have.

Makosuke · Oct 29, 2003

Mmkay, it turns out that Preview was hosed as well. Fortunately, that made it easier to diagnose, since Preview only has the one com.apple.Preview.plist file. Deleted it, and Preview ran fine with no funk popping up in the Console.

Doing a diff on the old and new plist files showed that a few things were not in the generated one, and a couple of things have been renamed, so obviously some no-longer-used pref was causing issues.

I couldn't just trash Mail.app's prefs, since that'd screw up my existing user accounts and Junk Mail training, so I basically opened Mail's plist file (I had already installed the DevTools, which include a plist editor), then went though and deleted anything non-vital-looking (window location settings, account view settings, etc)--basically everything that wasn't required to maintain the existing accounts. Booted it up, re-set a couple of minor things, and it seems to run fine now.

Not exactly a scientific way of fixing the glitch, but it was clearly caused by some pref that existed before and doesn't now.

What'd be really nice is a feature in X apps to "fix Preferences" or something; go through and delete anything that isn't used in the current version, and add anything that is required and not found. Maybe in 10.5?

mr-mac · Oct 29, 2003

User Problem

This sounds like a classic "I made a lot of customizations and now that i upgraded, it's not working right." While the OS may be fine, this has the markings of a user problem. You should create a new user and see if it has the same problems.

IF it doesn't, it's probably a carryover from something done in Jaguar that doesn't play nice with panther.

Just a word to the wise about 'tweakin':
tweaking may be a great way to get the most out of your operating system, but tweaks very rarely make it past an upgrade. If you have performed a lot of tweaks, you might want to consider creating a new user and reimporting everything. I know that the junk mail filter can be moved into a new user, as can all your email messages. All it takes to make it work is a little sudo chown -Rf NAME *

It's worth a try

Makosuke · Oct 29, 2003

Re: User Problem

Originally posted by mr-mac
This sounds like a classic "I made a lot of customizations and now that i upgraded, it's not working right." While the OS may be fine, this has the markings of a user problem. You should create a new user and see if it has the same problems.

IF it doesn't, it's probably a carryover from something done in Jaguar that doesn't play nice with panther.

Like I said, I know I'm bringing a lot of baggage along--it's not like I'm blaming Apple or anybody else for a clumsy upgrade of a system that's been using the same set of prefs since 10.0. Another imported user was fine, so that was clearly the problem.

Just trying to identify the specific issue, which was NOT due to any particular fancy tweaks on my part this time--if that had been the case, it seems like it would've taken more than deleting a preference file to fix it.

In an interesting follow up, Camino 0.7 release is working just fine, but when I downloaded the latest nightly (0.7 seems to have a few rendering issues under Panther, under all my users), it started choking on the same set of errors. Unfortunately, removing its entire preference folder didn't seem to help... uh, oh. Bigger issue (in which case, why did deleting Mail and Preview prefs fix their problems), or does Camino store more prefs elsewhere?

Makosuke · Oct 31, 2003

Just in case anybody else happens to run into this, I finally identified the cuprit: The only 3rd party enhancement I use on my system, Cocoa Gestures.

I thought I had the latest, Panther compatible, version when I upgraded (I was even a good boy and uninstalled every driver and extra prefpane before upgrading), but it turned out I was using 1.1 instead of the ok-on-Panther 1.2.

Deleting the prefs turned out to be a false alarm, since on apps with a plist of their own it just adds a key for itself (hence deleting that disabled it for that app and caused the app to work), while for Camino it created a seperate preference, since it has no plist, hence deleting the prefs didn't fix it.

Tricky troubleshooting, and that's what happens when you forget what you enable for which app.

tduality · Oct 31, 2003

Originally posted by Makosuke
Just in case anybody else happens to run into this, I finally identified the cuprit: The only 3rd party enhancement I use on my system, Cocoa Gestures.

I thought I had the latest, Panther compatible, version when I upgraded (I was even a good boy and uninstalled every driver and extra prefpane before upgrading), but it turned out I was using 1.1 instead of the ok-on-Panther 1.2.

Deleting the prefs turned out to be a false alarm, since on apps with a plist of their own it just adds a key for itself (hence deleting that disabled it for that app and caused the app to work), while for Camino it created a seperate preference, since it has no plist, hence deleting the prefs didn't fix it.

Tricky troubleshooting, and that's what happens when you forget what you enable for which app.

No kidding? I had that too after my upgrade to Panther. Didn't install it yet after making a clean install. Better get the new version then. Thanks for the info.

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Mail.app a Mess

Makosuke

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