Corrupted smart mailbox crashes Mail.app
UPDATE: 10 May 2007 — Looks like the post has vanished.
Neil Dixon at a minor technicality discovered 
that his Mail.app was crashing because one of his smart mailboxes became corrupted.
The smart mailbox mysteriously acquired three new bogus conditions. Removing those fixed the crashes.
As he points out, if you get Mail.app crashes without an error message, check your smart mailboxes for corruption before attempting anything more drastic.
Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, corrupt, mail.app, smart mailboxesRelated posts
May 5th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
http://neildixon.com/archives/2006/01/15/osx-mailapp-quitting-without-crash-error/ is coming up as
The requested URL /fcgi-sys/php-fcgi/index.php was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
May 12th, 2007 at 12:41 am
Jim, thanks for letting me know about the busted link. You know what he means by “bogus conditions” and how to check if that has happened to you, I am guessing.
July 1st, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Sorry folks, I changed my permalink structure.
Here’s the new working URL:
http://neildixon.com/2006/01/15/osx-mailapp-quitting-without-crash-error/
July 18th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Neil, thanks for letting me know. I’ll update the post to make it easier for people to find it.
December 5th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
how are you supposed to know if a smart mailbox is corrupted?
I have dozens and they hardly ever work correctly — it’s a miracle when ever one does work — right now they all show ZERO results — two days ago, at least a few worked — apple mail is so freekin full of bugs — just like os x 10.4 is full of freeking bugs from steve jobs kiss-@ss lazy @ss coders — all a bunch of redmond dropouts and rejects.
smart mail boxes are / continue to be / always have been totally unreliable osx is full of unresolved unfixed bugs going on at least 5 years on some of them. ridiculous. all apple cares about is selling, not serving actual customers who already bought the crap.
September 10th, 2008 at 7:03 am
Help. I’ve pulled the “envelope Index” folder out of the Mail folder, and put it on desktop. BUT, then when I launch mail again and clock “continue”
to import the messages, the Mail application just crashes.
Now what?
Help!!!