Mail.app crashing on startup

Apple’s Mail can be quite annoying but since it works with Exchange it saves me from working with Outlook. Something got that damn little color wheel of death spinning and it wouldn’t stop for several minutes so I force quit Mail. It was apparently doing something important because when I tried to start it up again it just crashed. It was quite consistent on this matter the 5 subsequent times I tried to start Mail.

I looked at the Report the crash reporter wanted to send Apple and it said it was blowing up on a thread that was accessing a sqlite database. I bit of googling led me to find Mail keeps a sqlite database at ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index. I knew from prior experience this database was not storing any of my actual mail, that is stored in text files so spotlight can easily search and index them so I decided what the hell, it couldn’t get any more broke than it already was right? I deleted the database and the associated journal file.

Mail immediately reopened and came up with a scary message about Importing all my mail. I told it to go ahead and it reimported all mail messages. It still displayed no messages. One restart of Mail again and everything was fine.