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April 25, 2007

Mail.app has been dying on me nonstop for the past few months. Maybe 1x every 4 hours it just crashes whenever I click a message.

Everyone online says "delete your prefs, that should work!"

I say "That's stupid! I have a bunch of accounts! I can't reinstall them all! and what about all the settings I want?"

So the solution:


cp ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist.backup


Then open up the com.apple.mail.plist in TextWrangler (or something similar) , and start hacking away non-essential plist keys/value pairs.

To get mail.app to work again for me, I deleted the following nodes:
ActiveEditors
ActiveSingleViewers
ActiveViewers
WebKit*

remember that key/value pairs in plists are:
<key>
<$value/>
ie, value nodes follow the keys

try deleting the nodes and restarting -- it should work. if not, delete some more.

using this method, you'll keep your accounts and settings intact -- except for the system crippling ones.

you'll also have a backup of your plist so you can copy/paste back in anything that was non-offensive.

I'm fairly certain that the crashes I have experienced occured because of these 3 nodes:
ActiveEditors
ActiveSingleViewers
ActiveViewers

so I'd suggest starting there. There are a bunch of miscellaneous settings and plugin options you'll encounter that can be tossed as well.

Posted by Jonathan at April 25, 2007 4:05 PM

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