Tiger Mail Hangs during Import

[sangree]

Okay...I know, clean install is best...however, the upgrade worked so well on my iMac, Powerbook & iBook that I got lazy and continued down that road with my G4 DP 1Ghz...now I've got a problem...when attempting to open Tiger Mail for the first time the dialog window (oops, did I just type that word) displays a message that Mail is Preparing to import...please wait. Knowing that it may take a while I left the room and forgot about it and then this morning the same message was glaring back at me. I canceled and tried again, same problem...just hangs at this screen...any hints as to how to proceed now without wiping my system or losing my mail or mail prefs?

Mark

[Krevinek]

Not really, those who have gotten Mail to launch with old prefs from 10.3 have had other issues (crashes and hangs) once it was running. The best option is to build the prefs from scratch, and then import the mailboxes themselves (not the accounts, just the mail within them). I /never/ do upgrades on systems because preferences will always wind up causing something to go fubar.

To go this route, remove all the mail folders from ~/Library and it's sub-folders, and then launch Mail 2, setup your accounts, verify they are working, and then use Mail to import mailboxes from the removed folders. (Don't delete them before you do this!)

[kefka]

If you have HTTPmail plugin installed from Panther then that is likely a possible issue due to incomaptibility. I had similar problems. Just do a spotlight search for "httpmail" and move the files and folders found to an archive on your desktop (some suggest just throwing them away but one of the folders contains mail data).

[Krevinek]

It still tends to be easier to start with a clean slate and add things until something breaks, than it is to remove pieces until it works (at least in my experience). You probably have something there with the HTTPmail plugin, though.