Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / October 2006

Is it just my MacBook, or is Mail.app getting more and more crashy since
the last software update or two?

I'm seeing the mail application crash (popping up the 'Report bug to
apple / Reopen / Close' dialog) several times a day now. Most often,
this happens when clicking on a spam message to mark it as read.  I
start to wonder whether Mail.app has some (potentially exploitable)
vulnerability causing these repeated crashes.

FWIW, I'm running 10.4.8 with 2GB RAM on a white intel MacBook.

I don't know if it's relevant, but I am running the current Intego
VirusBarrier AV product (mainly to avoid propagating Windows viruses in
mail attachments e.g. Word documents).  I have to say that Intego is
spectacularly useless (although not as awful as Norton AV for Mac) since
the main virus transmission vector is email, yet Intego does not
integrate with Mail.app in any way, nor does it offer the conventional
POP3/SMTP TCP proxies you'd expect to see on any Windows AV product.
Perhaps Intego is silently failing Mail.app's disk operations when a
piece of spam contain a virus - yet there never seems to be any data
loss after a restart, and Intego is capable of displaying pop-up
warnings when it finds a virus, so I'm not convinced either way.

Anyone else seeing crashes in Mail.app?  Overall it's a great program,
but I just wish it didn't crash so much ;-)

Cheers!

- Martin.