Error stating that I'm running an older version of Mail with a newer version of Mac OS X Mail.app stopped working on my Snow Leopard Mac after installing Security Update 2012-004 (Snow Leopard) (Post Date: September 19, 2012). Long ago, I moved Mail.app to a directory different from /Applications/ . At some point Mail.app got upgraded from version 4.2 (the one that came with the original installation discs) up to version 4.5, and it never got updated in my computer because the application was in a different directory - and it never complained until now.

This is the error message that I get when executing Mail.app:


  You can't use this version of Mail with this version of Mac OS X. You have Mail version 4.2 (1078/1085). It can't be used on Mac OS X version 10.6.8 (Build 10K549)


I have tried:


Moving back Mail.app to /Applications/ (same error message)
Running Software update (there was nothing to install, I'm up-to-date)
Re-installing Mail.app from the installation discs (it installed version 4.2 again, the problem persists)


None of the above have worked so far. Any ideas?

UPDATE :

I followed @BSDGuy's advice and managed to update Mail.app to version 4.5. But I'm getting the same error, except that now it's complaining about version 4.5! This is the error message:


  You can't use this version of Mail with this version of Mac OS X. You have Mail version 4.5 (1084/1085). It can't be used on Mac OS X version 10.6.8 (Build 10K549)
You can go to Apples web site and download the updates manually. The downloads site is:

http://support.apple.com/downloads/

Once there, go to the "Search Downloads" "10.6.8" update. You can download either the combo (for people who haven't updated much) or the last, which was just for the 10.6.7 to 10.6.8. You might want to find specifically which update made the changes.

What I would try is the following:


Move Mail.app back to /Applications
Perform the manual update(s) from the downloaded update


IF the download allows you to go through the packages and you can find out which package mail is in (the names aren't always straight forward) you could probably do a manual update using only that package.

This might be risky, but you could try actually doing the full update on the system. In the PAST, you could do that and it would ignore any updates that superseded what's in the package or already installed and only install those components needing update. I don't write Apple's update software so that might be risky.

Hope this helps.