Crashing Apple Mail

[good-dog at northshore.net]

Recently Mail has been unexpectedly quitting on me. It seems to happen 
when I'm deleting groups of messages at the same time.  One second I've 
got a string of messages highlighted, maybe 6, and when I press 
Delete,----<poof!>----Mail quits, giving me the Unexpected Quit 
message. It doesn't affect anything else.

  I'm on Jaguar 10.2.3, with Apple Mail 1.2.3 (v551), both running on an 
ibook 500MHz dual usb with 640 mb.

Today it's been konking out when I try to forward a particular message. 
When I failed at this a couple of times, I copied the text into 
TextEdit, thinking I'd attach the document to an email, but then my 
TextEdit passed out.

The crashing seems to happen when I try to delete, usually.  I get a 
lot of spam because of a project I did to give a gift in the form of a 
prank.  We took a photo of a friend's head and photoshop-ed it onto a 
gay porn star's body. It's a very funny gag, but the result is lot's of 
very bizarre spam. I've taken a big interest in Spamfire recently, and 
am considering it for purchase.  The crashing is often related to spam, 
as far as I can tell, but not limited to it.

Now, however, I've discovered a new trick: if you click&hold on a 
message, you can drag it right into the trash without it opening.  
Others may have learned this already, but it was a new one to me.  
Using this I've eliminated a lot of crashing, but not everything.  
Something appears to be wrong.

Up til now the Mail App has been rock solid.  Do I need to alot more 
memory alotted to Mail or somethingorother?

Any clues? I'd sure appreciate it.

Mark

PS:

Well, I tried to include my Mail Crash Log, but it was too big for the 
list server. If anyone wants to see it to figure out this problem, let 
me know and I'll send it. I don't know how to read it.

Mark