Mail crashes

Twice this week Mail has forced me to reboot my Mac. Once it froze, and although it would force quit, when restarted it displayed the same symptoms so I had to reboot.

Today Mail froze up and then took the rest of the Mac down with it.

I wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary.

Is there any way to "reset" the application, or ascertain what's going on?

Cheers.

Try the usual routine:

- Repair Disk Permissions
- Clean caches
- Repair Disks (with the boot cd)

Also see if you have any single mail message that might be corrupting the app... unlikely but it's a thought.
You can use MainMenu to do some maintenance on the machine.
www.santasw.com

Well MartinS, lots of things could be wrong, and Mail may simply be triggering other issues, not actually being the cause itself.

I would prescribe the usual course of treatment for a Mac that is acting up. First of all, run maintenance. To do this, get yourself a free copy of OnyX (http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html) and run ALL of it is Maintenance and Cleanup routines. Restart and see if your Mail issue is still there.

Then, make sure that you are not running out of disk space. Do this via the usual Get Info on your main hard disk. If you are, use one of Disk Inventory X (http://www.derlien.com) or WhatSize (http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize) to find out what is using up your disk space, and potentially free some up. Free up space, if needed, and then restart. See if the Mail problem is still there.

If none of these work, I would suspect that perhaps your Mail preferences file has gotten corrupted. You may wish to delete this and try again - SAVE off all of your messages first! Once you delete Mail's preferences, I believe that you will have to completely re-enter all of your ISP information. In essence, deleting the preferences file is the "application reset" you mentioned above.

Try all of the above, and report back. Good luck.

Thanks, guys. I'll get back to you...