Apple Mail was acting bizarrely on my wife's iBook and wouldn't download any mail. (She's running 10.4.5 with all updates installed.) I tried trashing the preferences, and that didn't help. Furthermore, when I went to reset the preferences, I noticed that (1) whenever I clicked on the rules icon, it would not bring up the rules pane, and (2) more importantly, whenever I tried to add a new account, it would lock up.
I then tried deleting the entire contents of ~/Library/Mail. I still had the same two problems in the preferences panel.
I then tried another account on the machine. Same two problems: Adding an account locks up, and can't access the rules pane.
Since the problem was affecting multiple users on the same machine, I tried looking for problems that would affect all users. I thought that the app might be corrupt. I reinstalled a fresh copy of Mail from another machine that was working fine and checked all of the permissions to make sure they were identical. When I started Mail, I still had the same two problems.
I also repaired all permissions from Disk Utility.
I couldn't see any "universal" preferences for all users in /Library/Preferences. Is there anything else that could be affecting Mail for all users on the same machine?
I'd hate to have to reinstall OS X for something like this...
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