"Is one of them Kern!?" I asked excitedly, skimming ahead; "Of course it is."

"Due to lack of resources?" Rick muttered; "That's a pretty flimsy argument."

"I think I'd go right past 'flimsy' and clear on to 'transparent.' I know a judge can't say 'I reject your argument because you're Kern County,' but, well, it's true."

But tomorrow, I'm going on a work snowboarding trip to Northstar and I'm pretty excited. I'm sure I'll suck for a good few hours, but I'm actually feeling pretty confident that most of it's going to come back nice and quick, and I'm already sort of brainstorming about taking another snowboarding trip before the season is over.

Colorado anyone?

The thing I find ironic about this comment is that it forgets functional programming completely, which kind of just emphasizes how bad PHP is at it.

Today's problem is this: sometime between going offline last night and plugging in my laptop this morning, I presumably deleted a message or moved a message or something, because when I plugged things in I was greeted with this dialog:

So I clicked OK, and in the background my other IMAP accounts were already starting to synchronize, but then that same dialog popped up again. I fought it off a few more times, and then Mail just hung and crashed.

I tried hunting around in ~/Library/Mail/ and tried deleting the local copy of the Drafts folder for that account, but it just came back the next time I started Mail and the problem repeated itself. It was reproducible enough that I even saw the "try starting this app with fresh preferences?" dialog for the first time (I think it was tweaked in the final version compared to the one I linked to), but for something like Mail that wasn't exactly desirable.

My hunch was that this problem had to do with the file ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index-journal [1], but it's a nicely inscrutable binary file that I was at a loss as to what to do with it, and deleting it didn't seem to do the trick, either.

Since I was able to start Mail while offline, I tried that and using yesterday afternoon's Time Machine backup to attempt to restore state, but that didn't work, either: Mail's Time Machine implementation is specifically message oriented, so I couldn't isolate whatever that problem was from the UI.

Ultimately, I had to move ~/Library/Mail out of the way and copy over the complete Library/Mail tree from the appropriate Time Machine backup, and that finally did the trick.

Uh, whee?

Update: Here's an Apple Support thread: "Mail crashing"

[1] This theory is anecdotally confirmed by the fact that the -journal file went away once I finally got everything sorted out, though that still doesn't explain why just deleting the -journal file didn't resolve the problem.