Mail.app flips out
Over the three years or so that I have been using Mail.app (and mistreating it by loading every tweak, script and plugin I can find), I’ve seen it weird out in lots of ways.
Phil Sherry has posted a photo 
in his Flickr photostream which tops my list of bizarre behaviours.
Maybe he puts it best: “Mail.app just freaked out on me.”
My first hunch is that it is some kind of font corruption. What do you think? Ever seen this sort of thing before?
Tags: Apple Mail, font, mail.app, menu corruption, problems, unhappy users, weirdRelated posts
September 11th, 2006 at 10:21 pm
I think you guessed right, most probably font corruption.
September 11th, 2006 at 11:01 pm
I’mnot so sure about the ont corruption thing. I have had this happen many times during a period when I was having serious issues with Mail.app. It was crashing at least once a day for me. Sometimes though it would get seriously screwed up like this - every menu did the same thing. My problem stemmed from having a Public Folder area (from my company’s imap exchange server) that had *WAY* too many mailboxes and items (over 50,000). When mail would try to synchronize this, it would regularly hit “too many file handles open” limit of BSD and wham, Mail would go to s*!t. I would have to trash my preferences and reset. I was making me crazy.
My Solution in the end (found somewhere on Mac OS X Hints, was to have my administrator turn off the public folders for me on IMAP. You could also make that folder in the mail folder read only, but that is not as clean.
Hope that helps someone.
September 11th, 2006 at 11:37 pm
Firstly, my .mac account stopped showing, then I couldn’t bring up Mail’s preferences, which is when I pulled the menu down. I force quit the application and relaunched it. It’s working as normal now, but I’m still in a state of “wtf?” as to why it happened.
September 12th, 2006 at 1:45 am
I think it is much more likely that Mail was just trying to print garbage memory as the strings.
September 12th, 2006 at 1:51 am
I have the same thing happen to my Quicksilver menus. Restarting the app restores the correct characters. Weird.
September 12th, 2006 at 1:56 am
I’ve seen this before — in other apps.
September 12th, 2006 at 5:58 am
The font seen in the ’shot is called LastResort. The OS uses this when no other appropriate font can be found/loaded. The actual glyphs displayed indicate what should really be seen in the same spot, so it’s also a troubleshooting tool.
See the entire table of LastResort glyphs at:
http://developer.apple.com/textfonts/LastResortFont/LastResortTable.html
September 12th, 2006 at 7:23 am
This thing and/or similar often happen after people have been opening or rather closing fonts that the system requires. It does not have to be the LastResort font. It could also happen after Helvetica Neue has been moved from the system or a new version of it has been opened.
September 12th, 2006 at 9:48 am
Agree with Sigurdur. Helvetica Neue being removed from the system causes this look. Open address book and if all of your characters are gone with huge leading in between just reload the system fonts.
I’ve done it to myself and it’s just irritating that Apple would even let this happen. Apple should just burn the fonts into ROM so they are always there and available.
September 12th, 2006 at 10:08 am
I’ve seen this happen in Retrospect, and it had nothing to do with fonts being removed from the System, since none had been removed!
September 12th, 2006 at 10:10 am
There is something about the fonts on X. Apple provides us with a plenty of fonts and for most normal home user it’s probably very welcome. But for people doing design this can become a quite confusing situation if they don’t know where all those fonts are situated and for what purpose. One reason is that Apple is using many fonts that are popular in design, like Gill and Helvetica Neue to name only a few. Worse is that some, like Gill Sans are pretty much far from Adobe’s Gill Sans most used in design.
Burning the fonts into ROM or similar action would probably make the situation even worse because then we would be stuck with what Apple provides and not beeing able to get a control over the fonts. I have have been helping many to solve font problems and writing about it on my site (mostly in Icelanic I am afraid). I am afraid there are not so much writing in English on the web about this subject. Or maybe I have missed it?
Anyway, I recommend strongly Linotype FontExplorerX to get control over the fonts. From it you can locate all the fonts on your mac and deal with any conflict. And it’s free btw.