After installing Safari 4 Public Beta in Mac OS X v10.5.6, Mail may unexpectedly quit when opened if a third-party Mail plugin is installed.

(Via Most Recent.)

Did you install the new Safari 4 Public Beta, and now your Mail application keeps crashing? It could be because you have GrowlMail installed. Try disabling Growl to see if it helps your situation. Or better yet, remove GrowlMail completely.

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Some time ago, I had set up my Gmail account in Apple Mail in order to copy over messages that were missing in my online jimmitchell.org IMAP account. I’m one of those guys who likes to have everything all in one place at my finger tips when I want it.

After copying over the messages I wanted, I completely removed the Gmail IMAP account from Mail and went about my business. Soon after, when I went searching for a specific email, I experienced the phenomenon of ghost emails in the search results (see image below). These are messages that Mail once knew about, but no longer knows where they exist. The ghost emails were all from the since removed Gmail account.

If you’re experiencing the same problem, here’s a very simple fix for it. First, quit Apple Mail if it’s running, then navigate your way to “~/Library/Mail/” (where “~” is your home folder) in the Finder. Once you’re in the Mail folder, you’ll see a file named “Envelope Index” which keeps track of where all messages are located. Rename “Envelope Index” to “Envelope Index Backup” (We don’t want to trash the file just yet).

Then, relaunch Apple Mail. You’ll be presented with a daunting “Message Import” dialog that looks like your email account was wiped out and you’re starting all over. Fear not. You’re simply rebuilding the Envelope Index at this point.

Click “Continue” to rebuild the index. Once it’s done, all those pesky phantom messages will be gone the next time you perform a search in Mail (Yay!). You can then go back to the “~/Library/Mail/” folder in the Finder and move the file you renamed to “Envelope Index Backup” to the Trash.

And there you have it. A very simple solution to a problem that has baffled some of the best Mac users.

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This is a follow up to the bit I posted last week about Mail.app hanging — usually at login/startup/wake, but then at other times for no reason in particular. My original post blamed the problem on iCal syncing To-Do’s with Mail (which I personally don’t like).

An update to that post later shifted the blame to GrowlMail. I can confirm — without a doubt — that GrowlMail has a problem with IMAP email accounts under Leopard, both on Intel and PPC based machines. While you could simply turn GrowlMail off in Mail preferences, my recommendation is to completely remove the bundle until it can be fully updated for compatibility. Note: a new version of GrowlMail was released a few days ago that supposedly addresses Leopard issues. However, my testing found it to still have lingering problems, so I promptly uninstalled it.

If you have GrowlMail installed, it can be uninstalled by removing the following files from your hard drive:

/Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.bundle
/Library/Receipts/GrowlMail.pkg
/Library/Receipts/growlmailPreflight.pkg

Since deleting those files, I’ve had no trouble with my IMAP account in Leopard Mail whatsoever. It should be noted you’ll probably have to authenticate as an administrator to remove the files.

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With the move to my new web host, I finally have the luxury of good, fast IMAP email again (thank you!). I had been doing the Gmail thing for the past few months using the very awesome MailPlane, but even as much as the app rocks, it still wasn’t quite what I was looking for in the way of doing mail.

Though I touted GyazMail as the mail app to have a while back, I’ve secretly harbored a desire to use my first love, Mail.app. There’s something about it that I find gets me where I want to be the quickest. But I digress. This post isn’t about which email reader is better…

Instead, this post is intended to help others who may have run into the same problem I had. Every so often when I’d launch Mail 3.1 in Leopard, or just at other times for no reason, the application would become totally unresponsive. Mail would still arrive, but I couldn’t do much more with it than move the main window around on my screen. I was almost as though the application was frozen, but not quite. Obviously it was doing something very resource intensive to become that unresponsive.

After some rooting around, I think I discovered the problem. By setting the “Add invitations to iCal” option in the General preference of Mail to “Never”, all of my freezes have suddenly disappeared. This may or may not help someone else who’s having the same issue. But for me, it did the trick. Your mileage may vary.

[Update] I’ve also noticed that GrowlMail doesn’t seem to be playing nicey-nice with Mail under Leopard. When I logged out or restarted, logged back in, and launched Mail, it would freeze up as GrowlMail thought about displaying a notification for each message, quite slowly.

If you have GrowlMail installed, and are experiencing freezes in Leopard Mail, try turning it off (Mail > Preferences > GrowlMail). Post a comment if that helps (or doesn’t). So far, it seems to solve the problem for me.

Oh, and I got rid of MS Office completely too. That might have some bearing, or it might not. I’m using iWork ’08 for that kind of stuff now.

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