emails that hang balsa

[Jack <ostroffjh sbcglobal net>]

Good afternoon,

I have now accumulated a number of emails that "hang" balsa.  CPU usage  
goes to 100%, and my only recourse is to kill the process, either with  
an explicit kill, or hitting the "x" button and letting the window  
manager terminate the process.

While I don't blame balsa itself, I'm hoping for some hints on how to  
troubleshoot, and maybe even find a way that balsa can recover without  
having to kill it, manually edit the mail file to remove the offending  
message, and restarting balsa.

Almost all these bad messages happen to be from airline frequent flyer  
programs (although I have had some from other vendors in the past) and  
all seem to be HTML without a plain text part.  Today's was
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
and I think most have been similar.  Because of the quoted-printable, I  
have not gotten a clean copy of the html to run through a validator,  
although I'm quite sure the html is NOT valid.  Unfortunately, I have  
had no success complaining to the folks that send these emails - their  
help desk folks have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about.

In the most recent case, doing an strace on balsa produced ongoing  
repeats of
  gettimeofday({1329504895, 985607}, NULL) = 0
  clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {669439, 367109540}) = 0
  clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {669439, 372953587}) = 0
with increasing numbers.  Rerunning strace filtering out these lines  
gives me
  brk(0x274d000)                          = 0x274d000
  brk(0x276e000)                          = 0x276e000
  brk(0x278f000)                          = 0x278f000
  mmap(NULL, 1048576, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS,  
-1, 0) = 0x7f63a1673000
  brk(0x27b0000)                          = 0x27b0000
again, lots of brk with a few mmap calls.

Balsa is 2.4.11, and I'm using webkit 1.6.1, and my assumption is that  
some invalid html is causing webkit to get into some loop on the  
interpretation/display, although I may be completely off base here.

So - I'm looking for suggestions on troubleshooting, with the hope of  
identifying the specific HTML problem, and maybe finding a way for  
webkit to be able to at least not choke on it, and also if there is a  
way balsa can get interrupted so I can either delete the message or  
move it to a different folder, without having to do so manually, as  
described above.

Thanks for any hints or advice.

Jack