Phasor Burn

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Today I had an unusual problem with my Apple Mail program (Tiger 10.4.10, MBP 2.4ghz C2D / 4G)

Upon launch, the app would beachball within a few seconds and the only thing you could do with mail.app was force-quit it.

I could see that the app was coming up with my work’s imap-ssl account selected as default, since that was where I had left off on Friday. Going into the work account via it’s webmail could not find anything unusual in the inbox. I deleted two small daily email reports with their small csv attachments, on the theory that there was something bad in them and mail.app wasn’t able to read them for some reason.

No dice.

Next I opened up the OS X console and viewed the system log while I launched mail. There were a few bundles that were failing to load, such as MailPictures. After removing the non functioning bundles and performing a reboot, I was still no further ahead.

Firing up the vpn and connecting into work directly, on the theory that imap-ssl wasn’t passing thru the firewall to me properly for some reason, didn’t help either.

After much flailing around, I finally hit upon the solution.

Perhaps it was something bad in the mail program’s preferences file.

plist files are slightly akin to registry files but are stored per-application and in an xml plaintext or xml zipped format. The Property List Editor is the normal way of editing these things but you could also do so by hand if necessary, if it isn’t of the compressed variety.

Now I can almost guarantee you it wasn’t a ‘registry corruption’ type problem that you see on Windows from time to time. No, otherwise I would have seen something out of place when I brought the editor up, or simply bringing the editor up and saving the file again would have fixed the problem. Which I tried first and had no luck.

Mail.app’s preferences file can be found under ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

Open it via the finder. It came up in “Property List Editor” as expected.

Luckily for me, I have several imap accounts that I need to get into on occasion but do not need them active all the time. Things like support@ and pager@ accounts that I only care to look in when on pager rotation etc.

I expanded the MailAccounts array and saw accounts 0 thru 8, representing all of my configured active and inactive pop and imap accounts. I dug around in there until I found one of the disabled accounts.

The account names were easy to discern. They handily had a property called “AccountName” The disabled account had a property of “IsActive” type String, value “NO”.

I found the stuck account next and determined that it did not have an IsActive property. So I added one with the value of NO, saved the plist file, started Mail.

Mail came up and was functional on my remaining accounts. Yay.

I went into prefs with command comma and reactivated the work account. It reappeared in the folder list and was functional. I restarted Mail and checked, yes everything is functional.

Now, WTF happened here to cause this problem? I have no idea.

Mail.app stores some stuff in sqlite3 database files, perhaps one of those was a bit confused or a temporary file somewhere was confused. A bit distressing that this could happen though.

What does a non-unix-geek Mac user do when this kind of issue comes up?

Well, “trashing” or removing an applications plist file is actually one of the troubleshooting steps that Apple will walk you through if you have AppleCare, if less drastic measures have not been able to rectify the situation. The application will recreate it’s plist (preferences) file and then it’d be up to you to go in and add your accounts again.

I’m not entirely sure what would happen to any locally stored mail in this situation. I would hope that it would be safe, and found automatically by the application when it came up with blank preferences.

I keep all my mail on imap servers and just keep local caches in the mail program, so I really wasn’t too concerned. Worst case I would have just had to renter all the account info. I just didn’t want to be bothered with all that when I knew there had to be a technical solution to this that was a bit more straight forward (to my unix geek brain anyways).

Do Not, originally uploaded by bonedad.

Great finds like this abound on flickr . . .

Just the thing to get my niece for christmas, don’t you think? Or should I hold out for the “Disney Princess Poison Ring!” ?

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Founded by a female US Army veteran known only as “Glambo,” GlamGuns.com was put together to mock stereotypes of women and girls and what they really like. Photoshopping of weapons and other “products” was done by Twitch who shares the madness. “Glambo” mascot provided by the brilliant artist behind Platinum Grit.

You can be glamorous and strong wearing camo and combat boots as well as you can wearing pink frills. Just remember the most important thing: the AK-47 NEVER goes with plaid.