Dead Ink Vinyl

Last week I was fighting with Mail.app, which was crashing on startup. It would launch — I could see the main window for a moment — then it would die and CrashReporter would give me the usual “Send to Apple?” dialog box.

I tried lots of tactics to recover Mail.app. Removing the Preferences file (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist) fixed the issue, but I lost all of my Mailboxes, which was unacceptable. I run Mail.app with the preview pane expanded, and the timing of the crash suggested that it may be related to rendering the default highlighted email message. I tried to locate the specific preferences controlling the default highlighted message, but was unsuccessful.

I then formulated various Google queries until I had created one that got me a useful answer. Holding down the Shift key while launching Mail.app suppresses the Preview feature (no messages are highlighted by default). When I launched Mail.app in this way, it did not crash. When I clicked on the suspect message with the preview pane extended, the application crashed. Clicking on other messages did not crash the application. Thus, I solved the problem by launching Mail.app while holding the Shift key, hid the preview pane, selected the message, deleted it, and emptied the Deleted messages.

I then setup Backup.app (from my .Mac membership) with a daily backup plan for Mail.app to ~/Backups/ and a weekly plan to CD or DVD. The plans include:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
~/Library/Mail/
~/Library/Mail Downloads/

I hope this information helps others.