Mail.app hangs - problem and solution?

August 3rd, 2005 · Comments · Uncategorized

Apple Mail in Mac OS X 10.4.2 is hanging whenever I create a new e-mail or respond to an e-mail. It hangs for about 1 or 2 minutes at a time.

After some poking around using Spin Control and Shark to find out what’s going on it looks like this backtrace points to the problem:

5615 +[MessageKeychainManager canSignMessagesFromAddress:]
5615 +[MessageKeychainManager copyTrustedCertificateForAddress:policy:usage:]
  5615 SecKeychainSearchCopyNext
    5615 Security::KeychainCore::KCCursorImpl::next(Security::KeychainCore::Item&)
        ...
              5615 DotMacRelation::MakeQuery(cssm_query const*)
                5615 DotMacQuery::DotMacQuery[unified](DotMacRelation*, cssm_query const*)
                  5615 DotMacQuery::ReadCertificatesFromURL(__CFURL const*)
                    5615 DotMacQuery::ReadStream(__CFURL const*, unsigned long&)

Every time I create a new email it does a query against a dot mac server! Attaching gdb to Mail.app and breaking on “DotMacQuery::ReadCertificatesFromURL(__CFURL const*)” gives me a chance to see what URL is being queried (I used gdb’s printout command to view the CFURL parameter: “po $r4″): “http://certinfo.mac.com/lookup?jwight”

The host at certinfo.mac.com (17.250.248.148) seems to be dead and Mail.app is blocking waiting for a timeout.

So this bug should be effecting all Apple Mail users with a .mac account (and I’m guessing .mac configured and enabled in their System Preferences). One quick solution would be to use Little Snitch to prevent Mail.app from accessing the certinfo.mac.com server.

I found confirmation on Apple’s support discussion website. It is effecting other people. The solution (work around) seems simple enough, delete the “~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.security.plist” preferences file.

Another more complete Apple discussion thread here

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