by: George Starcher, Associate Editor

I have been having an issue where my mail.app on my Macbook Pro unibody model would keep crashing since the 10.5.6 update.  Today Apple released a download link to fix mail.app in case you got a partial update.  However this did not fix my problem.  After two minutes it would still crash completely.  I run the same spamsieve version on my iMac which was not having the issue.  But I caved and decided I would delete the mail plugin and see if that worked.

On my way into the folder ~/Library/Mail/Bundles I stopped at ~/Library/Mail because I noticed while mail was running a file called AvailableFeeds was at the top of my directory.  A second file by the same name with an extension on it kept flashing up and disappearing.    When I force quit Mail.app the second file quick oscilating into and out of existence stopped. That sure sounded like a corrupt file bug to me.  

I made sure Mail.app was closed.  Then I dragged the AvailableFeeds file to my Desktop and reopened Mail.app.  Similar to how one might move a suspect corrupt plist file.  I restarted Mail.app and have not suffered a crash in an hour.   Nor is the second file showing up any more.  The program was crashing within five minutes.

So if you are still seeing Mail.app crash, go into your home library mail (~/Library/Mail) folder and see if you observe the same behavior from AvailableFeeds.  If you do then give this a shot and see if it fixes your crashing too.

Links Mentioned:

• Apple KB Article TS 2486