I solved the Mail bug. It had nothing to do with hardware problems, and everything to do with the fact that, several weeks ago, I renamed my “bloy[at]nd.edu” account to “brendanloy[at]alumni.usc.edu” (an address which, in actuality, forwards mail — for the moment — to bloy[at]nd.edu). Details after the jump.

The instances where Mail was failing to save sent mail (or drafts) were those instances where my selected outgoing-mail account was “bloy[at]nd.edu,” even though that account no longer existed. For some reason, the account’s digital ghost, if you will, was still the default outgoing-mail account for new messages. So when I’d start a new message, my list of options would look like this…

…when, if it were working properly, bloy[at]nd.edu shouldn’t have even been an option, let alone the default:

Whenever I would start composing a new message without switching manually to a different account, Mail would then try to save the message — first as a draft, then as sent mail — in a location that didn’t exist: the folder corresponding with the nonexistent “bloy[at]nd.edu” account. (In Mail’s file structure, each individual mail account has its own “Drafts” and “Sent” subfolders.) Because it couldn’t save the message (technically an .emlx file) in a nonexistent location, I’d get the familiar error message:

I had noticed that “bloy[at]nd.edu” was still mysteriously showing up as one of my outgoing-mail options, and I’d wondered about that, but until a few minutes ago, I hadn’t noticed that it was the default, nor had I made the connection between that anomaly and the ongoing problems with saving messages.

I’m still not sure why the nd.edu account stuck around the way it did. The actual setting didn’t say “Send new mail from: bloy[at]nd.edu”; it said, “Send new mail from: Account of last viewed mailbox,” as you can see below:

Since there was no longer a “bloy[at]nd.edu” mailbox, that should have precluded this problem. But for some reason, it was getting “stuck” on using the nonexistent “bloy[at]nd.edu” account as its default — even though that account had been renamed weeks ago to “brendanloy[at]alumni.usc.edu.”

I think the cause of the problem may have had something to do with the matter-antimatter collision of USC and Notre Dame e-mail accounts. :)

Anyway, I reset the default account to the “brendanloy[at]alumni.usc.edu” account, then set it back to “Account of last viewed mailbox,” and that seems to have fixed it. There’s no longer any trace of the “bloy[at]nd.edu” account among my outgoing-mail account options.

I’m glad I finally figured it out, though annoyed that it took me this long. Bah.

Of course, the unexplained core-app crashes, weird UI glitches, erratic behavior when waking up from sleep, and several other miscellaneous symptoms remain unresolved. But at least Mail’s working again, and I won’t keep losing sent mail into the ether.

P.S. And yes, Jay, I have been studying for the bar, in between all these computer problems. :) Though it isn’t so much CrimLaw and Contracts that await, as CivPro and Family Law…

P.P.S. I should clarify: I actually do still have, and use, my Notre Dame e-mail account. If you send something to bloy[at]nd.edu, it will still reach me. But because that account is eventually going to expire, I’ve “renamed” it “brendanloy[at]alumni.usc.edu,” so that messages sent from my Notre Dame account will appear to come from my USC alumni account (which, in turn, forwards all received mail to my Notre Dame inbox). That way, people will get used to using my USC address, and then eventually I can switch it over so brendanloy[at]alumni.usc.edu redirects somewhere else (like perhaps irishtrojan@gmail.com), at which point I really will stop using bloy[at]nd.edu.

For now, though, what I really have is a Notre Dame e-mail account masquerading as a USC e-mail account. That ought to get the ND Nation folks’ hackles up. ;)