A pple Computer has publicly addressed an on-going problem with the crashing of its Mail application by recommending users simply reset the Junk Mail filter. The Apple Info document does not give in-depth details on the symptoms that cause the problem.
The problem, first addressed by The Mac Observer on February 18th, has been known for well over a year and Apple has not updated the application to fix the issue.
The Apple info document recommends resetting the Junk Mail training filter after the application crashes. While a quick fix, resetting the filter will wipe out all the rules previously learned by the Junk Mail filter, meaning a user will then start receiving junk mail again until individual pieces of are marked.
The info document does not address how to get around not having Mail crash. The culprit appears to be e-mail that has no text body, title or sender information, but simply a receiving date. It is this blank e-mail, that when manually marked by the user as junk, causes the application to crash under most circumstances. Only after some clean up and clearing of the Junk Mail filter settings do things return to normal, but not always.
The document gives no indication if Apple considers the problem to be serious enough to actually fix the Junk Mail filter, which is part of the Mail application.