Mac Mail App Hanging...

I did some searches on google and here, and have not had success finding a solution to my problem...so here goes.

I have an Intel Based iMac running Mac OSX 10.4.x (Tiger)

Everything is running fine except Mail. I've scanned the disk for issues using the Mac Disk tools and found now errors.

I'm using Mail with POP3 to get my email. I can access and download the email from other systems just fine and I can view it with a web client.

Here's the issue. There appears to be a corrupted email in my Inbox and possibly some of my folders, because whenever I navigate to that folders in question, the system goes on forever trying to generate the list of emails. While it's doing this, it is taking MAJOR resources from the system and I can't control anything or even quit or force quit Mail. When this happens, my only course is a reboot.

The one thing I have done successfully, is to delete the mail preferences file and reinstall email and reimport the mailbox and folders. This gets things going again and lets me download all the new mail. The problem is, I need to get to some of the mail that's in these folders.

Does anyone have either a procedure or the name of some software that can scan and fix my mailbox file, or let me find and delete the bad messages?

Thanks in advance.

Additional info...

I tried to backup the mail folders so that I don't loose anything as I try to fix this, and it had problems reading files during the copy. The Disk Utility scan didn't find anything.

So now the question is, does the Mac OS have something like chkdisk or scandisk that I can run against the drive or folder that can detect and correct file corruptions?

I'm a bit surprised I didn't get any responses to this thread as busy as this forum is and with the amount of views this thread had. However, no big deal.

I was able to find the issue and correct the problem.

The Cause, a corrupted file, and email file to be exact. When I tried to copy the mail folder to another location for backup, it failed about half way through it but reported a filename it was not abile to read or write properly. I located the file which was in a folder under the mail folder and moved the file to a safe location. I repeated the folder copy and it worked. I started up email and all is good. I was able to use MS Word to view the email and make sure it wasn't something I needed (it wasn't), and I deleted it. So basically, the filesystem was fine, but the file itself was corrupted in some way making reads or writes to it choke the application accessing it.

Anyway, I hope this helps someone out there.