Mac OS X, Our First Real Panic

On Sunday morning Mac OS X's Mail application quit working, exactly 2 weeks after we converted to Mail from Outlook Express 5.02 as our main mail application. There's a happy ending, though. While somewhat embarrassing, we hope a detailed account will help others understand that Mac OS X is fairly hard to hurt and can be as easy to fix as previous Mac OS's.

First, we are "early adopters" for a reason, i.e. to inform you of the state of things so that you may make an informed decision as to whether or not to take the plunge. Therefore, we expect on a regular basis to encounter problems and the situation where there are no commonly known workarounds. We are neither whining nor trying to discourage but are just presenting the facts as we encounter them. Second, we love OS X and our editorial policy is to facilitate migration to OS X.

Since updating to Mac OS X 10.0.1 we have experienced a higher frequency of freezes and kernel panics when waking our PowerBook 2000 (FireWire) from sleep than before. In fact, this did not happen at all prior to installing 10.0.1 but we can not blame it on the update since it could be simply a corruption issue (perhaps in Mail?) that has developed since then. However, this issue on PowerBooks has been carried on a number of web site fora so we know we are not alone. It has never happened on our desktop Macs.

On Sunday, we woke our PowerBook from sleep to check our mail and it had a kernel panic. A kernel panic is characterized by a freeze with lines of system text in white letters with a black background streaking across the screen describing the error in UNIX speak. When we rebooted, Mail would not launch from the icon in the dock or from its icon in the OS X Applications window. Mail contained two weeks of our mission critical email. The first rational thing we did was to copy the User->MyLoginName->Library->Mail folder to our backup drive and then confirm that it was not lost forever by importing the mail into PowerMail 3.0.9 for OS X.

Resting easier, we set about trying to recover the use of Apple Mail but overlooked something that our years of Mac OS troubleshooting experience should have screamed that we try first but didn't. We decided to trash Mail and reinstall it. It can't be installed separately from the CD but it could be copied from another computer on our network. Well, the stricken Mail application couldn't be deleted either in Mac OS X or by rebooting into Mac OS 9.1--we got an error message stating that Mail is an integral part of OS X. We were tempted to login OS X is as "root" so we could delete Mail and do whatever damage we wanted but luckily decided that would be folly. So we moved Mail out of the OS X Applications folder and copied a new one from another computer into the Applications folder by dragging and dropping its icon. Over 900 files were copied! Alas, when we tried to launch the newly installed Mail application it quit during launch with a dialog box dutifully telling us that no other applications had been affected.

By this time we had a response to our request for help on the X4U list. Norman Cohen suggested doing what we have long suggested to everyone seeking help with Mac OS application problems. Delete the preference file! It (com.apple.mail.plist) is located in User->MyLoginName->Library->Preferences folder. We did, rebooted and launched Mail just like new. We had to reenter all of our accounts and their preferences but Mail has worked perfectly since. We are also stuck with two copies of Mail on our hard disk as neither can be deleted by dragging to the trash.