Leopard Apple Mail--Universal, but not quite

johnbaxterlists (apparently) - 09:01am Nov 8, 2007 PST
via email

Not surprisingly, Mail.app in Leopard is Universal.

One of our people using an Intel iMac shut down normally last night,
and later did some housework, during which she accidentally unplugged
the power to the DSL modem without noticing.

Her Mail account is set up for IMAP and to save Drafts (and Trash,
etc) on the server (the account is a role account shared with another).

This morning, she tried to send a message, and got an error about
being unable to send.

There then ensued a frustrating sequence in which a message would come
up about being unable to append to the Drafts folder (not
surprising). Upon clicking OK, the same message repeated (and the
count of Drafts in the on-machine Drafts folder incremented).
Eventually, Mail crashed.

She then noticed the DSL problem, and got DSL running OK, but
restarting Mail immediately produced the same error message sequence
and crash. Looking at the IMAP server logs I could see her machine
logging in and immediately out repeatedly.

She started her morning using webmail. Meanwhile, during my shower I
formulated a plan to try to recover (using screen sharing so I could
drive).

Meanwhile, she found the "Open using Rosetta" checkbox in the Finder
info window, and checked it.

The PowerPC form of Mail opened fine, and she was able to get rid of
the ghost drafts and receive and send mail.

After which, unchecking Open using Rosetta produced a perfectly
functioning Mail (although a few account settings needed refreshing
for no obvious reason).

So in the particular case of Mail.app, it appears that PPC code not
quite equal Intel code in function.

All is well now. Although it's unlikely to help in most cases, trying
a forced PPC execution under Rosetta may be worthwhile sometimes. I
would not have thought of it (and she had no idea what Rosetta was,
but tried it anyhow).

   --John