red dot indicator for mail in Panther 10.3

[matt johnson]

I'm using a MAC with Panther 10.3.2.
the red dot (with a number inside) used to indicate you have new mail, does not appear any more when I receive new mail. I've already stumped the people at apple.

Any ideas?

Matt

[wdlove]

You are very lucky to have Mail running.

Sadly I can't even use mine at all. Have ask for help and so far no solution. :(

I'm still running Entourage via Classic, help.

I did a Run Disk Utility (Inside Applications/Utilities) for a Repair Permissions. Believe that it was MrMacman that suggested this course of action. My problem persists.

First questions: I imported from Entourage already. I just finished updating Classic Entourage today. Can I re-Import, so will it update to the new information. Meaning that I won't have a duplicate.

I just tried opening Mail, it bounces in the Dock, but do not get a window. Had to do a force quite. What should be my next move to correct my problem?

[Maritan]

Matt - I have the same "problem." I'm running Mail on 1.25G PB 15" with 10.3.2.

It might be a bug, but Mail will show the number on the icon only if there is new mail in your Inbox. If you have other folders set up and use filters to move the emails there directly, Mail doesn't recognize it.

This might be your problem. If you are getting new mail in your Inbox and still not seeing the number, I don't know what the problem is.

[virividox]

wow you guys seem to be getting the short end of the stick

i havent been hit with this problem. but all i can think of is short of reinstallling the system is either delete ur mail plist file or reinstall mail

[Maritan]

virividox - So you see the number on the icon even if you have an email in some "On My Mac" folder?

[virividox]

Originally posted by Maritan
virividox - So you see the number on the icon even if you have an email in some "On My Mac" folder?

i was refring to the original post, i see the icon when i get new mail or have unopwened messages

[joker2]

Not sure what is causing the problems described here, though I will reiterate what one poster described about using mail rules. If it re-routes something to another folder, you'll hear the new mail sound, but will not see the icon (for mailing lists rerouted, junk mail auto-moved, etc.)

I do see the accurate number otherwise when I receive new messages. (10.3.2, all updates installed, pb12"1GHz)

wdlove: you should be able to delete what is there and re-import, unfortunately, it doesn't just update what is already there. Good news is, your Entourage files were untouched, as Mail created a copy for its own use. If you create another user on the machine, does mail start for that user? (let's not worry about importing for now.) If so, try deleting the entire "Mail" folder from within your "Library" folder, empty trash and restart.

[wdlove]

Originally posted by shadow95
wdlove: you should be able to delete what is there and re-import, unfortunately, it doesn't just update what is already there. Good news is, your Entourage files were untouched, as Mail created a copy for its own use. If you create another user on the machine, does mail start for that user? (let's not worry about importing for now.) If so, try deleting the entire "Mail" folder from within your "Library" folder, empty trash and restart.

I am the only user. I went to my Library and trashed the Mail folder as you suggested. When I click on the Mail icon in the dock nothing happens, except my menus bar changes to Mail. Then I went to file, new window. Not able to close the window, but had to do a force quit.

By restart do you mean to restart my Mac?

I really appreciate your assistance shadow95. ;)

[Makosuke]

Like shadow95 said, most issues with Mail not launching seem to be related to corrupt preferences (of course, the same holds for other applications as well).

If you don't need to salvage what mail is already there, you're lucky, since that means you don't have to go through and try to find the specific corrupt file within the "Mail" folder, and hope it's not vital so you can still access your old mail.

By the way, in addition to the ~/Library/Mail folder (which is probably where your problem is), there's also a preference file (com.apple.mail.plist) in the ~/Library/Preferences folder. If removing the Mail folder doesn't work, try getting rid of that, too.

[joker2]

:) I was suggesting to restart your actual machine .
Creating another user would be only a temporary thing just to see if the mail app started for that user, thus limiting it to the prefs. If it didn't start for the temporary user, then you might have a corrupted application on your hands.

[wdlove]

I checked in my Library Preferences folder and didn't find a (com.apple.mail.plist) in the ~/Library/. Would it have been removed whrn I trasehd the Mail folder from the Library?

Would Norton Utilities or Drive 10 be of assistance in this case?

[joker2]

Have you tried creating another user? That will tell us a lot whether or not that new user (which you can delete later) can open the mail.app properly or at all.

[matt johnson]

Actually, the red dot as well as the number does not appear on my icon.
As far as I know the mail is not rerouted to other folders (even though I do have
some others set up). If I dump my p.list will I lose my info in my folders?
(ie. sent mail, trash, in box)?

Thank you all for responding, by the way.

[mactastic]

I get the red dot on my mail.app icon. Both in the dock, and in the command-tab window. Weird that it's not working for you. Oh and I'm running 10.3.2.

[Powerbook G5]

It's working fine for me, as well. I am under 10.3.2.

[wdlove]

Originally posted by shadow95
Have you tried creating another user? That will tell us a lot whether or not that new user (which you can delete later) can open the mail.app properly or at all.

Thank you in advance shadow95. I set up my wife as the second user. Then set up her mail account with her actual information. It went through the connection process OK after a T&E basis, had to check up her Mail Preferences in her PowerBook.

When I clicked on the Mail icon in the Dock nothing happened. Went to File, select new viewer window. Then select new mail. Got the beach ball and spinning. It took T&E error before I could do a force quit. I logged out of her account. Then I shutdown the G4.

My thought are to boot up with the Norton SystemWorks and run Norton Utilities.

So shadow95 what does this mean? So what now? Help?

[joker2]

Hmm. I would probably recommend against Norton, but DiskWarrior would probably be a good investment. Now that you've done a few things to your machine, I would recommend repairing permissions again, just to see if it finds anything.

What is this T&E basis & error you're mentioning?

DiskWarrior (http://www.alsoft.com/)


Also, you may end up deleting those files again, delete the mail.app itself, and then follow directions Here (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106451) to reinstall the mail application. (only after repairing permissions, and diskwarrior)

[wdlove]

Originally posted by shadow95
Hmm. I would probably recommend against Norton, but DiskWarrior would probably be a good investment.

What is this T&E basis & error you're mentioning?

It took me two tries to get the proper seting for my wifes Mail. Then withthe spinning beach ball it wouldn't allow me to us the force quit at first. Can't remeber exactly what I did, but it worked.

So you reccomend that I don't run Norton at all, or you just don't think it will work. All I have is an older veresion of DiskWarrior. So is my only next option to purchase DiskWarrior? As far as I am awre there is no upgrade price?

[joker2]

it was probably irresponsible of me to suggest disk warrior first. This seems to be a problem affecting not just the preferences, so I'd probably (delete preferences & app, restart, repair permissions, then... ) replace the mail app from your panther disks first as outlined in the apple article.

Disclaimer: I'm not an Apple certified tech. This seems to me to be the logical steps to follow given my own experiences.

[joker2]

So you reccomend that I don't run Norton at all, or you just don't think it will work

I don't think it will work, but if you do run it, be sure you're upgraded to 8.0.1:

Norton Utilities 7.0.x has not been tested on any version of Mac OS X later than 10.2.6 and is known to be incompatible with Mac OS X 10.3.x.

It's a possibility that if you have Norton installed, it may be the cause of a conflict with Mail. Stranger things have been known to happen. (what was that application that prevented typing of the letter 'a' in any other application due to some sort of software conflict?)

(rant on)
Norton has recently seemed to hurt more than helping. It still does very well on the windows side. On the mac side since version about 3.5 it would never cease in finding tons of supposed errors that it toggled back and forth on certain files each time it was run (bundle bits, custom icons, etc.), none of which generally fixed the error I was looking for.

The additional utilities took more resources and caused more conflicts than they were worth at the time. Disklight was cool, but it slowed things down noticeably. Their filesaver utility would crash a clean install of the operating system I was working with at the time.

Don't get me wrong, I still use Norton's Disk Doctor and SpeedDisk on older MacOS(es), but the current offering doesn't inspire much confidence. (rant off)

[wdlove]

Thank you again shadow95.

I booted up my G4 with the Norton SystemWorks disk, using the C-Key.
Ran Norton Disk Doctor, It found Major & Minor errors. Also have a newly attached OWC Mercury Elite attached, found Major errors also.

So I ran the Norton Disk Doctor on the G4 a second time, "no errors found." :)

Both had severe fragmentation, so I'm running optimization currently.

I will re-boot and see what happens when I try to open Mail from the Dock.

[wdlove]

After I rebooted my G4, I clicked on the Mail icon. It jumped a couple of times, but no window. So I went to file, open new window. When I tried to close Mail nothing happened and had to do a force quit.

Then as suggested prior, I went to Applications/utilities. I opened up Disk Repair and ran Repair permissions.

Just now clicked the Mail icon in the Dock. Al it did was to jump twice. Again I went to file, open new window. Something that I noticed is that at the top it said "No Mail Box Selected." Don't know if that is significant.

Tried to quit Mail with no response. So I did a Force quit.

shadow95, you mentioned reinstalling Mail. Is that an easy process? IS is something that you could easily assist me through? Or would I be better off at this point to take my G4 into my local Apple Store? Is this a Mac Genius situation?

[joker2]

For the "no mailbox selected" part, you'd either click on the "Mailboxes" button on your toolbar or go to "View" and select "Show Mailboxes"

As for re-installing the application, I would suggest taking it to the Genius bar, as I wouldn't be comfortable walking someone through messages.

(What I would do personally would be to back up my data onto previously mentioned external drive, wipe the internal drive and do a clean install of Panther- install all the updates, and then move my datafiles back over once I was sure everything worked. Most people don't have the luxury or the patience to do so, and many argue that you shouldn't have to go to such extreme measures.)

[skitsbox]

I am wondering if anyone out there has any info about this? It has some of the same problems listed above which is why i am listing it here.
I am an art director for a product design company. We have 3 macs at work on the same local network a g3 400, dual g4 1ghz, and a dual 2ghz g5. I instaled the same single user panther on all 3 machines. (so 1 box os on 3 systems) First on the g4 then the g3 and g5. I have had multiple problems with the g3 and g5 none with the g4. Problems: 1. safari crashes on start up 2. email same.(it starts with the aboved mentioned problems) 3. then programs start crashing. I have not heard of any protection on the panther os but it would seem that there is.( I am not a new user i have worked on macs since 92 and on amigas and com64) i have gone threw all things i can and for my first time in my life i cant find nothing on this)
any thoughts?
I have also loaded this at home on my system and it works perfectly

[Counterfit]

As a not-quite-last resort, you can reinstall Mail only, by using Pacifist. That app has saved quite a bit of trouble a few times now :)

[Makosuke]

Originally posted by skitsbox
I have not heard of any protection on the panther os but it would seem that there is. I very, very seriously doubt that there is any sort of protection in Panther--I've seen or heard no indications whatsoever, and since you don't put in a serial number or similar info when you install it, there's absolutely no way that it would know you'd used the install discs on more than one computer. There is no identifying information whatsoever.

And, on the exceedingly small chance that Apple somehow found a way to magically insert a unique serial number on a pressed CD, I still don't see why they'd make the symptom of their restriction random glitches while the software is running--wouldn't it just tell you outright you were doing something wrong?

That said, something is causing these problems, and they're far from universal--there are obviously many people using Panther and few having these problems.

As shadow95 has been getting at, these sound a lot like disk corruption (particularly skitsbox's problems). It could actually be a failure of a physical disk, particularly if the problems grow progressively worse after a clean install, as with skitsbox--I had a very similar problem with a dying hard drive as well as a Samsung drive that needed to be specifically set to ATA66, or the data on the drive would grow progressively more corrupt (though the OS would boot and some apps would run).

I wouldn't touch Norton's utilities that run in the background--I've heard dozens of reports of them causing instability, and not a single report of them helping--and Norton's disk check has been getting less and less reliable over the past few years, so that's suspect, too.

DiskWarrior is an alternative I've had luck with, though I haven't run it recently, and Drive 10 is another I know nothign about. Here's a TidBits article that gives some suggestions on disk problems: http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07451

As for the original no red dot query, using Pacifier to extract the Mail app from the OS install disk and replacing the apparently bad one is good, although it's also possible that there is a problem with an OS framework of some sort that won't be fixed by just replacing Mail.app. In that case a full OS reinstall should do the trick (and if you preserve users, getting back up to speed shouldn't take long, though be cautious about bringing back the bad preference file that caused the problem or the utility you forgot you installed that is the root cause).

Good luck.

[jevel]

I've seen similar problems, and what I did to fix it was to boot with installation DVD, run disktool, repair disk. (The option greyed out when you're running distool from within OS X.)

Also had trouble that noone could remedy, and thsi diskrepair tool found errors. Only thing I could do was a complete reinstall.

-KJ

[MacBandit]

This to me sounds like a more underlying problem then just Mail.app. I recommend doing a system reinstall using the archive option and be sure to not copy old prefs over.