Chris’s cheat sheets

OK, this is one of those problems that come up only if you do something silly or simply something really unusual.

Basically, I experienced a terrible situation today when my Leopard Mail.app refused to work. It was crashing all the time even before the window would appear on the screen and a standard Relauch/Ignore dialog box was popping up all the time. This is one the error messages I found in Console which is a built in application and can be found under /Applications/Utilities:

18/12/2007 11:12:16 Mail[167] *** Assertion failure in -[LibraryToDo mailboxUid], /SourceCache/Message/Message-915/Library.subproj/LibraryToDo.m:205
18/12/2007 11:12:16 Mail[167] An uncaught exception was raised

18/12/2007 11:12:16 Mail[167] Mailbox UID is not set
Stack Trace: (
(
2530345579, 2474053787, 2530345035, 2462609636, 4844373, 3408319, 4829155, 2461484666, 2529720906, 2529721635, 2461473392, 13228, 4990192, 3024109, 2530368413, 2530366856, 3999207, 2461487181, 2461486068, 2472796277, 2472795954
))
18/12/2007 11:12:16 Mail[167] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception ‘NSInternalInconsistencyException’, reason: ‘Mailbox UID is not set’
18/12/2007 11:12:16 Mail[167] Stack: (
2530345579, 2474053787, 2530345035, 2462609636, 4844373, 3408319, 4829155, 2461484666, 2529720906, 2529721635, 2461473392, 13228, 4990192, 3024109, 2530368413, 2530366856, 3999207, 2461487181, 2461486068, 2472796277, 2472795954
)

The first question is: what might have caused that? And the answer is: a recent update of my Exchange email account settings in Mail.

Last night I was VPNing to my office network and I was forced to replace the Exchange server hostnames with raw IP addresses (under Mail Preferences -> Accounts -> Incoming and Outgoing Mail Server) because for some reason my computer stopped resolving them and was not able to send and receive messages anymore. And when I got to the office today and tried to access my email, the application started crashing.

Solution
As I wasn’t able to access Mail and restore the previous Exchange settings I decided to create a new Mac OS X user account in order to temporarily replace my corrupt ~/Library/Mail settings with a fresh bunch of files. I backed this directory up and after sorting out the permissions I grabbed the files from /Users/NEWLY_CREATED_ACCOUNT/Library/Mail and dropped them under ~/Library/Mail. Then I tried firing Mail up and this time it did not crash. I fixed the the Exchange settings, restored the original, backed-up copy of ~/Library/Mail, restarted the Application and could see everything up and running again.

The moral of the story is “don’t give up when Mail doesn’t want to start” Just create a new user account, replace the Library settings and start the process from there. I don’t know if there is any other way (other than the one with the updated Exchange settings) of making Mail crash but if there was one, going this route might be a good way of restoring your email without even thinking about reinstalling the system or anything as severe as that.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 16:23 and is filed under Mac OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.