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blakespot · Jan 27, 2004, 11:56 PM

I get about 400 messages a day in my inbox - 99% of them being spam. It's sad. This # has just recently risen to the current total - it was holding at 150 a day or so for a long while. I was getting lots of help from Mail's great spam filter.

Well, with this load of spam, Mail is choking and dying during mail retrievals. I have noted what msg # in the POP pull it died at, went into my ISP's e-mail via web and killed the msgs around that #, and did the pull again and it made it past that batch, only to die later in the pull. Some messages are killing it. No updates to the OS have helped in recent months. I even created a whole new INBOX to see if that had something to do with it - no dice. I am running the latest ver of Panther currently.

I am forced to use another mail application now, and none out there seem to have a spam filter with Mail's intelligence.

Are you folks seeing Mail crash like this? Frustrated.

bp

Sophus · Jan 28, 2004, 07:19 AM

I get about 75-125 spam mails every day and have 4 accounts. I have never experienced Mail crashing, not once in 2 years as far as Ican remember.

I did however have problems with mail not filtering spam after I upgraded to 10.3. Found that I had several duplicated mailboxes (for some reason). Deleted the extra mailboxes and all mail preferences, then started mail and all was ok.

Maybe you should have a look at your preferences?

SMacTech · Jan 28, 2004, 09:32 AM

I never had problems with mail until 10.3.2, and then it started crashing when applying junk mail rules to certain emails. I reset the junk rules, and it would be fine for a week or so, then it started crashing again.
So now, I just delete them and hope Apple fixes the damned problem.

fortepianissimo · Jan 28, 2004, 02:54 PM

Originally posted by SMacTech:
I never had problems with mail until 10.3.2, and then it started crashing when applying junk mail rules to certain emails. I reset the junk rules, and it would be fine for a week or so, then it started crashing again.
So now, I just delete them and hope Apple fixes the damned problem.

Any specific characteristics of these problematic junk mails? Do they have malformed message IDs? (check the raw source of the message to see if the Message Id has the form "<something@something>) Or do they have malformed file attachments? (rendering is usually blank in this case)

blakespot · Jan 28, 2004, 04:03 PM

Originally posted by fortepianissimo:
Any specific characteristics of these problematic junk mails? Do they have malformed message IDs? (check the raw source of the message to see if the Message Id has the form "<something@something>) Or do they have malformed file attachments? (rendering is usually blank in this case)

I am not sure - I have not determined this. It would seem that _something_ is "wrong" with the e-mails that kill Mail, but still we should not need to rely upon "good" e-mails in the INBOX to have Mail stay afloat.

And for others that comments on mail rules - are you referring to actual "rules" you setup to do spam filtering or simply the fact that you enabled Mail's "intelligent" spam filtering components?

I am using Thunderbird right now, and see it has an adaptive spam filter as well - not sure how well it works compared to Mail tho...

blakespot

msuper69 · Jan 28, 2004, 04:37 PM

There are a few reported problems with Panther mail. I don't have any of them, thankfully. Check out the Apple Support Discussions thread about it here.

I don't know what these people do to their systems but wow they know how to f**k things up somehow.

hotani · Jan 28, 2004, 07:22 PM

there are a couple of other threads regarding this topic.

Apparently nobody knows what's going on with it. I turned off the junk mail feature and have been crash free ever since. YMMV

nobitacu · Jan 28, 2004, 08:51 PM

I've never had my mail app crash either... Sorry to hear about your problems... hope you find a fix to it soon.

Ming

Captain Maniac · Jan 28, 2004, 09:18 PM

I just had Mail crash for the very first time today (after using it for at least a year in Jaguar and for about a month in Panther). I got a "Mail has unexpectedly quit" message, after deleting a PANTLOAD of Spam from my inbox. I will admit that Mail usually does a good job of redirecting spam to my Junk box, and I'm also fortunate that my ISP (Telus) has something called Spam Control: this filters spam to the extent that, according to user preference, you can have it automatically deleted or sent to your inbox with a "Telus Detected Spam" notice in the subject line of each questionable email. But yes, I've noticed in the last few days, the volume of spam has increased tremendously.

macaddled · Jan 29, 2004, 03:06 PM

Just for the record, I'm having this problem too (crashes when applying Junk mail filter.)

blakespot · Jan 29, 2004, 07:24 PM

Originally posted by macaddled:
Just for the record, I'm having this problem too (crashes when applying Junk mail filter.)

So a good question is...is it an easier life using Mail with no SPAM filtering or using Thunderbird (Mozilla mail client) which does have "learning" SPAM filter...but not sure how good it is yet. I have both going now and am using them both.

How is Thunderbird after a while of use? I wish Mail worked...

blakespot

fortepianissimo · Jan 29, 2004, 08:08 PM

Originally posted by blakespot:
So a good question is...is it an easier life using Mail with no SPAM filtering or using Thunderbird (Mozilla mail client) which does have "learning" SPAM filter...but not sure how good it is yet. I have both going now and am using them both.

How is Thunderbird after a while of use? I wish Mail worked...

blakespot

If you really want to keep using Mail, one option is download and install JunkMatcher, and use it alone to filter spam - see this FAQ.

GORDYmac · Jan 30, 2004, 10:51 AM

I think I'm going to switch back to Entourage. I fought the good fight, but Mail is really starting to irritate me with the crashes, forgetting junk mail rules, etc.

hotani · Jan 30, 2004, 11:35 AM

looks like somebody figured out the problem. But it requires losing all your "learned" settings.

Personally I'm fine without the filtering. It wasn't doing much anyway... junk would still show up in my inbox, and good messages would still get put in the junk folder. So I just turned it off and only allow messages from people in my address book. Not a complete solution by far, but in addition to that I've started using another forwarding address (i can set up as many of these as i want with my mail host) and giving it to people to use so my own filters will allow any message to that address through to the inbox.

someone_else · Jan 30, 2004, 12:56 PM

Ever since Panther, I've been having the Junk mail crash problem, but even before that I was having the problem the thread author stated, where Mail would "hang" downloading messages. The problem was infrequent, but it did occur. Removing the offending message using my ISP's web mail program allowed Mail to continue normally.

As for the Junk mail crash, I've disabled Junk mail. I've deleted the LSMMap2 file many times, but the crash always comes back. I'm also using Junkmatcher, the problem is that there is now no way to move a message marked as Junk mail, since Mail's internal filter has been turned off.

Mail really sucks right now, but I have too much time (and archives) invested in it to switch.

Hopefully the problem is fixed in the next update.

fortepianissimo · Jan 31, 2004, 12:01 AM

Originally posted by someone_else:
As for the Junk mail crash, I've disabled Junk mail. I've deleted the LSMMap2 file many times, but the crash always comes back. I'm also using Junkmatcher, the problem is that there is now no way to move a message marked as Junk mail, since Mail's internal filter has been turned off.

If you use JunkMatcher alone, you can still move matched messages to Junk mailbox. Don't turn off the "automatic mode" of the built-in filter. Instead, turn off the "Built-in Junk Filter" rule (one of the rules you set up when you installed JunkMatcher) - that will effectively turn off the crashing built-in filter.

Also, in JunkMatcher Central, turn off "Mark as Junk" action so the built-in filter won't be invoked in any way.

If you decide to move messages to Trash mailbox, then you can turn off the built-in filter completely in Junk Mail tab of Mail's preferences - the only reason to keep it on when moving messages to Junk mailbox, is that without it Mail won't give you a Junk mailbox. Of course, you still need to turn off "Mark as Junk" in JunkMatcher Central.

(these are all explained in the FAQ page.)

Hope this helps.

cdhostage · Jan 31, 2004, 05:11 PM

I've found that Mail poops out once in a while, but it only ever happens when I'm transferring using several services at the same time (Carracho, LimeWire, Safari, iChat, Mail, any 3 of the above at the same time results in a crash of one two minutes later, and the whole system five minutes later.

spiney · Feb 1, 2004, 10:08 AM

Mail crashes for me repeatedly when checking my imap account. The last time it crashed I lost the contents of on of my mail boxes. Gone, file size = 0. Cant recover it.