Mail unexpectedly quits when selecting inbox message. Please help!

[drj434343]

This problem has gotten worse over about 2 months, so that now, everytime I open Mail and attempt to click on any one of my inbox messages that have already be delivered, the program quits, and I get the dreaded "application has unexpectedly quit" message box. Furthermore, any mailbox I attempt to click on the left column (sent, trash, etc) also yields the same results. Mail is essentially totally unusable. I'm running fully updated 10.4.9 on a Powerbook G4 and a stock copy of Mail with no plug-ins.

I've been digging through Google for solutions, but most seem to be cases involving older versions of Mail with older versions of OS X. Doesn't seem like it would be applicable here. I've tried a few basics: restart, reinstall the 10.4.9 update, repair permissions, and check disk. Nothing has helped.

I haven't gone as far as to remove my mail preferences file, because I'll loose all my mail messages. I have several years of 3 gmail accounts in mail. I absolutely can't loose those. I have several backups of the mail folder and the preferences file I could drop in, but only at last resort. Can anyone suggest another solution? Could a corrupt preferences file cause this issue? Is there anything else I can do to try and fix Mail, short of reinstalling OS X?

 

[ClassicBean]

Do you have parallels installed? Reason I ask

is that my mail was doing some pretty funky stuff - it got so bad that I went back and forth with Apple over the phone and sent them some data from my computer.

Basically, apparently when you install parallels it actually messes with some system stuff in os x - which is definitely not a good thing.

Let me know if that is the case and I can give you some details that might solve it. Might not work as mine was related to a network issue that parallells messed up, but who knows.

EDIT: Ok, I see you're running os x on a powerbook, so my parallels question doesn't really apply. My bad.

Create a new user account and see if the problem happens there. At least this way you can isolate the problem.

 

[drj434343]

OK, I trashed my preference file and setup a new account with Mail. It appears to work fine now. I'm guessing that tells me it's something with the plist file.

Any ideas on how to recover or fix the mail preferences if one of my backups don't work? I tried two apps already, Preferential Treatment, and Pref Setter. Neither program found any issues with the preference file at fault. Any other suggestions?