Mail hanging with Snow Leopard

Hi Guys,

I've tried everything without luck. Please help me. I've both trashed the:

- user/Library/preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
- ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book.V22.abcddb file

I do not have any file name anything with smartgroup or group so I can't delete that. I'm getting desperately over here.

This seems to work for me:

Quit Mail.app
Removed "Envelope Index" and "RSS" from ~/Library/Mail/
Launched Mail.app
Let Mail.app rebuild
The immediate hang after launch is gone. Seems fine now.

I found that just deleting the Smart Group in Address Book solved the problem. Of course, this assumes that Address Book will launch and allow access to your data.

My problem was that both Address Book and Mail would launch, but each would take about 20 seconds after launch to display any data (in Address Book) or to check for mail (in Mail), while the color pinwheel was spinning. During that time, Activity Monitor was reporting that the app was using 100% of CPU cycles (sometimes 101%!!) and would briefly display "application not responding". Address Book was then very slow to do anything (like delete a record or switch groups).

It took awhile to delete the Smart Group. I only had one, and it was based on a negative condition (contacts that were not assigned to any other group). But once it was gone, both apps now launch and begin working normally.

I tried the procedure described by MRVural and Mail re-imported the messages and it looked ok once it was done but the same problem started again after I re-started mail.

This is very frustrating.

I installed Snow Leopard on all of my macs and got the slow slow address book issue described above on my iMac but not on my MBP.

Symptoms
Address Book taking a full 15 minutes of SPOD to open.
Cross-Effect - slowness in Mail and anything interacting with Address Book.
process mdworker using close to 100% of one CPU power

IF and Only If you have Smart Groups in your address book the solution is:
Open Address Book
Wait for SPOD
Select your 'Smart Groups' in Address Book
wait for SPOD
Click the 'Delete' Key
Wait for SPOD
Quit and rerun Address Book
all should be happy.
Quit and rerun Mail
all should be happy.
mdworker will now spin down to 0% if you keep an eye on top.

Thanks. Your hints worked perfectly in my case. After deleting the cache and the envelope file Mail started to import all Mails and Mailboxes without losing anything.

Thanks again


Klaus

Message was edited by: klausee

I too am having issues with Mail hanging up. I hope one of these suggestions works for me.

GOT IT FIXED. WAS APPARENTLY RELATED TO RSS FEEDS SETUP IN MAIL IN MY CASE.
I had the same issue : since the upgrade to Snow Leopard, Mail was crashing just after loading, not leaving me time to do anything.
The logs (in the details of the dialog box allowing us to send the info to Apple) were saying something like "failed to open feed" in the first lines.
I actually did have some RSS feeds setup in Mail, so I removed the <account_name>/library/Mail/RSS directory.
I can now launch Mail and use it without any problem so far.

I just tried deleting the RSS. No luck for me. Looks like I will be reversing the 10.6 attempt on my work computer and going back to Entourage 2008.

I am happy to resolve that my Mail and Address book issues are now apparently resolved.

This is what I did:

Let Address Book run (close to 30 minutes) until the spinning wheel stopped and I had access to delete the only smart category that I had configured.

Once the folder was gone both Address Book and Mail started to behave just fine and their performance is way faster than before.

Kind of disappointing though that Apple did not appear to have tested this as they should specially when they advertise that Snow Leopard fixed a number of "under the hood" issues.

tks,

marcelo

This solution worked for me as well. But only after being very careful and after having attempted both individually before (i.e. addressbook and mail file deletions).

Step 1 - I logged in under another account and verified that both mail and addressbook worked.

Step 2 deleted the mail and addressbook files detailed above. In my case I was initially unable to empty the trash because the addressbook files were "in use". I restarted, then empty'd the trash successfully in the problem account. I launched addressbook - no groups but otherwise looked OK. Launched mail - imported messages - able to send and receive. Problem apparently solved -finally

I deleted the RSS folder and it fixed the problem.

Yeah Pretty ridiculous, Apple. I looooved using the RSS feature in Mail, but now I cannot because it crashes Mail.

Apple, please fix this!

It seems my error is tied to iCal. If I have iCal open, Mail will hang. If iCal is not open, Mail is fine. Well, mostly fine. It will hang if I make any changes to the preferences.

Thanks - this is indeed the trick. One addendum: if you then recreate your smart groups in your Address Book, all stays well. That's a relief.

Cheers --Mike

Thank you for sharing your tip about deleting the RSS folder... I was tearing my hair out over Mail post Snow Leopard but you saved me from insanity with a simple tip that worked 100%! Thanks again!