The macosxhints Forums - Mail.app 10.3

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- - Mail.app 10.3 - 10.4 (http://hintsforums.macworld.com/showthread.php?t=39701)

Perhaps some useful info could be obtained by turning on logging in Mail.app

In Tiger you can do this via the AppleScript at /Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts/Turn On Logging.scpt (which presumably should show up in the Scripts menu).

For Panther, see this macosxhints article:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...04101603285984

I note that the topic of getting debugging info from Mail.app was in this other thread:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=38996

Quote:

Originally Posted by ibroughton

Thanks for all this info, it is causing me a great headache at the moment as our users are balming us for this issue. The more info I can gather that says otherwise the better. If it is something at our end, I can set about fixing it, but as it appears that the root cause is with Apple, not a lot can be done it would seem.

I wonder if anyone has filed a bug report?

Quote:

Has anyone done a script to check for mail that would work round this problem? (I know so little about scripting, I wouldn't know where to start!)

This is very unsophisticated, but it works for me.

Code:

#!/bin/bash

if ps -auxw |grep -q Mail;

then osascript -e "tell application \"Mail\" to check for new mail";

else osascript -e "tell application \"Mail\" to launch" -e "tell application \"Mail\" to check for new mail";

fi

Some explanations are in order:
(A) If Mail is open, asking it to launch everytime seems inefficient and excessive, however, if Mail is not open when the script is called, then the delay while Mail opens causes you to get prompts for passwords on all accounts. Replacing 'launch' by 'activate' is not an answer to this as it will cause Mail to come to the front every time mail is checked and that would be annoying to users who are working when Mail is being checked. Hence, the script is as above.
(B) The -q flag is to keep grep silent.
(C) Amazingly enough, the script ignores the Mail processes of other users and will launch your Mail if it is not yet open even though other users have their Mail open.

After creating the file mailcheck with these contents with pico, I made it executable (chmod ugo+x mailcheck) and then moved it to /usr/local/bin so that it could be accessed by all users [I don't know if ownership has to be changed for all users to be able to use it or not]. Then, I used the system cron to call this script every 15 minutes. It will check mail only for the user who is logged into the GUI at the time.

I think I will do as hayne has suggested and turn logging on. Thanks, hayne.

I've filed a bug report and am advising users to do the same, the script works great, not sure if our users are savvy enough to get it installed as a cron job though.

Never even thought that this might affect another OS. Maybe it's something in the UNIX based core that is having the problem?

Here is a new thread where a user has this problem with one of his Macs but not with the other. That seems to exonerate the ISP as well.

On that other thread, the problem seemed to be fixed by deleting the user's keychain and then rebuilding it. So it might the the user's corrupt keychain.

No, deleting and rebuilding the keychain doesn't usually work. Even from a clean install (10.3 and 10.4) this error still occours

Been a bit busy over the last week and have only just noticed that the problem has gone away! Mail is no lnger asking me for my passwords!

I don't know about you ibroughton, but I still think it was BT or Blueyonder screwing me up, they are right scheisters!