[ginjg]

My hard disk was full, only 278mg left. I trashed some miscellaneous files and demo apps (none of which were anywhere near the mail app by the way) from my hard drive, checked to make sure that the trash contained only trash, emptied the trash and restarted as is recommended after removing apps.

After restart the dock had moved back to the bottom of the screen and contained only basic icons and questionmarks in place of safari, mail and idvd.

I put the dock back where we prefer and Safari and idvd were easily placed back in the dock but the mail app had completely disapppeared. Not anywhere to be found. All the mboxes were still in tact so I copied the mail from my other mac over our network and everything was accessable.

What could have caused this? How can I prevent it?
G4, dual 867, 10.2.6

[Kickaha]

You had so little disk space left on your machine that during the shutdown some apps could not properly save to their preferences files, and they were mangled or lost. On restart, the apps (including Finder and Dock) realized this and replaced them with fresh defaults.

It's best to keep no less than 500MB free at all times so that apps have sufficient swap space at shutdown to properly perform their tasks without tromping on free space for writing out prefs and such.

In 10.3, the Finder now gives you a warning if you're about to go under 500MB free.

[ginjg]

But what caused the mail app to disappear completely. It was completely gone and it was not in the trashcan before I emptied it.

[Gargoyle]

Have you accidentally dragged it into some other folder?

[ginjg]

No. I did a search and it was nowhere on any of the 6 drives.