Spining wheels going no where

Hi I'm having the same problem with the mail spinning endlessly. I have a brand new iMac and I'm afraid I couldn't follow David' instructions.

in the Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail/. (For instance I couldn't follow this.)

thanks in advance.

Dan Hart

I have tried all these ideas and none have brought a solution. I still getting the spinning wheel. What are my other alternatives?

This problem did not exist 24 hours ago. It just started and there is nothing new in my computer. If Mail is on line, I have this problem. If mail is off line, I do not have the spinning wheel, but of course, I don't have any incoming or outgoing mail to work with at that point!

Thanks.

Hi,

This may be a too simple solution as I had a similar problem recently. The spinning wheel seemed to go on for ever and i also had to force quit. I powered down overnight just to give everything a rest and in the morning the problem was the same. I moved the mouse to the problem icon by the mail and it told me the mail was stored on the 'Server' obviously back at apple. So I put my faith in mr Mac and left it while I had a cup of tea and read the paper. The Problem went away as the issue was the size of the download attachment on the mail and my link speed. It was a question of just giving it enough time without looking at the machine where time drags.

Hopefully this may be the same problem for you

Alan E.

Alan, I tried your solution and unfortunately it was too good to be true. I let the computer program run for many hours, and I also checked on line that I don't have any incoming messages... so it's not this problem. Must be another! Thanks. James

I'm having the same problem with Mail.app -- the "spinning wheel of death".

The most recent change to Mail.app was enabling an IMAP account. It appears that the IMAP driver in Mail.app is completely synchronous and refuses to even allow interruptions. The only way to interrupt it is externally, by killing Mail.app.

And, of course, upon restarting Mail.app, the IMAP driver jumps right back into some kind of synchronous, non-interruptible activity.

So, my only recourse was to remove the new IMAP account by hand-editing the plists in ~/Library/Mail. bleh. Yeah.. that's very user-friendly.

I would be glad if serious pain were inflicted upon the stupid programmer who wrote (design is too good a word) Mail.app's synchronous IMAP software...

None of the solutions has helped me. The console log shows nothing. The system log says "hfs_relocate: didn't move into metadata zone" -- I have no idea what that means.

The whole spinning wheel started today after I had to force quit Mail in order to do a restart. Then it wouldn't get out of the spinning ball at all. The application window never comes up. I have no idea what to do now.

I have been having this same problem for several days. The gray wheel spins endlessly, saying "reading table of contents." Sometimes it says "copying message 3 of 6" or just copying index, or some such thing. the activity viewer shows Opening mailbox and synchronizing with file system. I tried dragging the messagesorting.plist and backup on to t he desktop, enabling and disabling the Junk Mail filter, but all to no avail. I can still receive and send mail, but I have to force quit every time. I have let it run for hours, but it is like the energizer bunny..... keeps on going. Can you help? Thanks. There was one error message I found in the console or somewhere... "ATSU measure text has been deprecated. Use atsu get unjustified bounds instead" ????

I tried everything that you have suggested but I think my prob is a little different. My 11 year old daughter tried to attach a photo to email by draggin it into the mail body and sent it. the email neither shows up in sent or draft files. When I open mail it opens the problem email and then the spinning wheel of death appears. THEN IT CRASHES. I've tried nearly everything. Any suggestions?

P.S. my daughter now knows how to properly attach a file but won't be using the computer for a while...

Yes!!!

I've had this problem (spinning wheel that freezes and causes entire mail program and then computer to freeze) for a month now and had to move all my mail activities off my MAC to my PC in the meantime. Thank goodness I found this thread. This fixed it perfectly. THANK YOU!

You are a Genius
I had the same problem and now it's solved
thank you

I embarrassed to admit that I am way past 11 years old but I managed to create a "phantom" draft in much the same way ( I dragged something onto an e-mail in error, I believe it was a huge file). The spinning wheel is there whenever I touch mail regardless of whether I am connected to the internet or not. In the Draft box there shows (1) in bold, but there are 0 messages showing in draft. There is nothing in the Out. Earlier today I let mail run with the spinning wheel for quite some time, a blue dot eventually appeared in the Draft window, but a message name never appeared beside it. When I log into Mail offline it seems to be stuck on Opening mailbox on the dialouge box. Photoqueen19 Were you able to resolve your problem. If so please tell me what worked....Thanks