The honeymoon is over - my Mac has locked up at least four times today and then when I went into a meeting and closed it up it tried to cook itself and I came out the meeting with a hot brick and a flat battery.

Macs just work...

...sometimes.


And using the Mac Email program is ridiculous. If you are preparing draft emails and there is something in your Outbox and you are not connected it keeps locking up every two minutes to try and send it before kindly telling you it can't send it but if you would care to wait two minutes it will happily have another go.

Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrgh! I am trying to write an email you stupid program.

There, got it off my chest now.

I hate Macs

Sneaky Macs

Rannoch

 

Was it a complete lock up, or did something just crash, or was it a case of it just shutting down for no reason? I ask the last one as there is a known issue with the machines getting hot and there being a short, causing them to shutdown randomly.

Have a peek at this and see if there is anything useful.

I assume you have the latest firmware on it as there was a known issue with sleeping macbooks getting rather hot. This could also have some information of use. It sounds as though it's not sleeping when the lid is closed, thus it's still running and getting a wee bit warm.

 

agreed, Mac Mail is sh1te. I use Thunderbird..... much better.

Sorry to hear you've had some problems. FWIW, mine is working fine

Time to get some updates perhaps

Dan

 

Thanks guys

Sometimes it was a complete lock up, sometimes it was an extended but not complete lock up as MacMail tried sending an email when there was no connection - I WAS OFFLINE YOU STUPID PROGRAM!

Yes with the lid shut it does not always go to sleep and gets very hot and runs the battery down really quickly - it is probably still trying to send some bluddy email!

I have autoupdate on and would hope that it is all up to date. I will check.

And yes - MacMail is rubbish. Very limited features and the outbox problem I had yesterday was simply very bad design.

Rannoch

 

Have you installed any third party software?

 

Yes, NeoOffice, Firefox, Mac Messenger, Missing Sync, HP Printer services, Google Earth and some utilities for DVD ripping to iPod, .wmv conversion, etc.

Why do you ask? It is hard to imagine any of these stopping Mac Mail from working correctly.

 

Not had any issues with my Mac mail although mine is always on the net (tower g5 at home) - The only annoyance is when it can't find the smtp server due to ISP issues but I just say try later.

I don't it's ever crashed and I have years of email in there.

 

Like RichB I don't have the issue, I have a Macbook and an iMac, the main differences between your machine and ours will be the software you've installed, unless you're very unfortunate.

If I'm not mistaken Missing Sync works with your mail program, I have no idea how so wouldn't suggest it could cause problems.

 

My Macmail does not offer me the opportunity to try later - it just keeps trying every two minutes and every once in a while this locks up the system.

Turning Macmail off solved the locking problem (but not the sleeping problem which I hopefully have fixed following the link from Markus).

Missing Sync was unlikely to be the source of the problem as it had not been 'mounted' at the time.

I have to say that my Macbook is at least as likely to crash/lock as my Wintel machine which is contrary to the Mac propaganda I hear everywhere.

 

What do you mean by "Turning Macmail off solved the locking problem"

Do you mean quitting the Mail application?

 

Yes

 

I thought this option sorted out when macmail checked for new messages??

 

dont forget about doing a good old disk permissions clean up , either using disk utility or cocktailx

 

SwissTony,

the issue was not trying to receive mail - that seems to work OK - it was repeatedly trying to send mail when it was not connected.

And it could not just try and not send it. It would lock up (sometimes) and even when it did not manage to do that it would helpfully interrupt what I was doing to let me know it had failed to send any mail. And it would do this every couple of minutes, which when you are trying to draft emails is BLUDDY ANNOYING.

I have never experienced this with any other mobile mail program.

In terms of "cleaning up permissions" I have absolutely no idea what this means.

Rannoch

 

If you go to your hard disk->applications->utilities->disk utility
Choose your HD, click 'repair permissions' it can sort out some nasties sometimes. Worth a shot!

 

Thanks, done and no fixes needed to be implemented.

 

David,
I'm going to take a guess that you have mail in online mode when you're composing the emails but you do not have an active internet connection. From the quick tests I've performed I think I know what the problem might be. When the send/recieve activation time is encountered, which in your setup appears to be every 2 mins, mail will attempt to send the email. This will fail as you don't have an internet connection. It will present a dialog asking you what you want to do. I'm guessing your dialog is different from mine as you possibly have only one mailserver configured, whereas I have a few.
In my setup I have the option to select a different server and/or try again later. If you have a single server then it probably won't offer the choice.
The lock up might be that you're working on a mesage and the dialog is appearing behind you active window, or above the current window. As it's a non-modal (think that's the correct term) dialog it takes precedence over everything so you have to select an action on it, you cannot put it in the background and continue working.

Is there a solution to your issue? Yes, when you're not connected to the internet and you wish to use mail, simply select you inbox, and from the mailbox menu select "Go Offline". This will put mail into offline mode. It will not automatically send/receive email, all messages will remain in your outbox until you go online, either by clicking the lightning bolt icon, or selecting "Go Online" from the mailbox menu. You will not get any annoying dialogs saying it cannot find the server when in offline mode.

 

Markus,

thanks for that - your solution will fix the mail dialog issue however it still does not explain the complete lock-ups where I could not do anything.

Cheers,

David

 

Have a look in:
/Library/Logs/Crash Reporter/
~/Library/Logs/Crash Reporter/ (that's the Library folder in your Home folder)

See if there are any crash logs from the time when the lockup occured. See what application(s) are mentioned, as it might give a clue.

What I would normally suggest is to send me the logs and I'll get my dev buddy to look at the log, but he's on holiday at the moment and I don't have that special voodoo that allows me to understand what the heck the logs mean

The only other thing I can suggest is to pop over to the apple discussion forums, macfixit forums and macosx hints forums and post the description of the lockup there and see if anyone has any other helpful hints and perhaps post the crash logs (or links to a zipped copy of them) as others may be able to read and make sense of them.

About the lock ups, was it a complete and total lockup? Could you move the mouse cursor at all? Was it the whole machine that was locked up or was it just Mail that was unresponsive. What other applications did you have running at the same time?

 

I could move the mouse but nothing else was responsive.

The rainbow wheel was whirring but never stopped so it was 'waiting' for something - what I have no idea!

 

Oh, and I tried to force quit MacMail at one point and it had no effect.

 

Ok, so it wasn't a total freeze then as you could move the mouse, which is something. In all occurances of this could you get the Force Quit dialog to appear? If so, what other apps were running?

How long did you leave the machine for when it was in this state?

I don't suppose you were connected to a network share then the network connection was closed?

 

I could not always get Force Quit to appear.

The other apps were NeoOffice and Firefox (less stable on a Mac than XP although it usually just disappears rather than lock up). There may have been other things running but I can't think what they would be.

I left it a couple of minutes, long enough

Oh, and I am was not connected to a network share.

Rannoch

 

Reason I asked about the network share is that the Finder is a wee bit sensitive about network connections getting dropped and then you trying to unmount the share. For example, if I power off my server and then unmount a share, my iMac sits there for aprox 5 mins. The reason is that there is a tcp/ip timeout in the OS and it's waiting for the connection to time out before it'll disconnect. This seriously narks me off as the machine is all but froze until the Finder decides to timeout and then everything is back to normal.

When you were in Disk Utility did you happen to use the Verify Disk option as well as the Verify/Repair permissions option? If not then give it a shot, see if any errors come up. I doubt it's a disk error issue causing the problem, but it's worth checking.

I'm going to guess that this does not happen all the time and you don't have a reproducable scenario that will cause the problem to occur? If you do, Select "Logout" from the Apple menu and you'll see a login dialog. Type in, or select the username relating to your account and then enter the password (it's the same username and password that you'd use when you click on one of the "padlock" icons in, for example, System Preferences).

Do NOT click the Login button yet. Hold down the shift key and keep it held down and click the Login button, and continue to keep the shift key hold down until the Finder has loaded. This will prevent login items from loading. Then try and reproduce the issue, or if you don't have a reproducable scenario, see if the problem occurs.

What the above does is to prevent login items from running. What you could also try is to reboot the machine and hold down the shift key until you see the login dialog. This is known as a safe boot and will stop most things, such as startup items from loading, similar to XP's Safe Mode. If you combine the safe boot and the shift key at login to prevent login items from loading then you can see if the problems occur. If not then it could be due to a startup or login item clash. Login items can easilly be disabled by going into System Preferences -> Accounts -> Login Items and then removing them.

 

Markus,

thanks for you efforts with this and if I have the problem again I will try what you have suggested.

Rannoch