[X4U] Re: What Is IMAP ?

[Randy B.Singer]

Cornett said:

>May I ask that you expound a bit on the unique characters
>that will(and have) crash/ed Mail application? 

I don't know which exact characters, or combination of characters, does 
it.  I've read articles about it, but I haven't kept the articles or 
their citations.  I understand that this is more of a problem for Windows 
computers, where, combined with some number of characters in the subject 
line, Outlook can be made to crash.

Mail.app can crash if you get one of those odd spam messages with a blank 
subject line and a blank body:
<http://homepage.mac.com/beowulf/beoblog/C1345736521/E1588268709/index.html
>

Who figures out these things, and then would want to use them just to 
cause others aggravation, I don't know.

>Strangely
>enough over the last few weeks, I've lost 4 Inboxes to
>corruption during Mail's downloading processes and very
>immediate crashes, to where I've had to toss the .mbox
>each time and lose all those unread/unanswered mails,
>after going in thru the webmail portal to see which it
>was that was the culpret, yet couldn't find which one
>it was(what would I look for?), 

The ones that I've encountered that have been causing such a problem 
usually show up with complete gibberish in their subject line.  It's easy 
to identify these and trash them on the server.

A couple times a year I encounter a legitimate message sent by someone 
from an AOL account with a large attachment that can cause crashes.  I 
don't know what AOL does to these attachments/e-mails, but I've heard 
from a number of folks who have noticed the same thing.  This may be the 
same problem:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=196933



Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

Routine OS X Maintenance and Generic Troubleshooting
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html