Mail stuck on 'Saving Drafts'

Hi all.

Surgery 2 weeks ago seems to have gone well.

Delay in getting back on line due to lightning strike killing local phone lines 2 WEEKS AGO on the Sunday when I got home from hospital. Only partially fixed to date! but at least the internet seems to be accessible. Phone still very noisy and will not ring in and difficult to ring out. Engineers continue to work on it - apparently.

I still have the saving drafts problem.

Have tried the various methods above to clear....except deleting library V6 files as I am not confident I can recognise which ones to delete.

I have found that the problem seems to be associated with the Yahoo account; when I use the preferences > mail accounts - to remove the tick from the activate Yahoo mail box then the problem stops.

But this may be that since Yahoo is the main mail account I use then the other two do not have any drafts.

I am not sure when the problem started but seem to remember it was around when I updated to MOJAVE. prior to that there was not even a hint of being stuck on saving drafts and I have not changed anything since the update.....this leads me to wonder if the problem is really with the new OS (recently reinstalled it) and the Mail app in it.

A question is where is the programme/OS saving the drafts from and where to. Also how do I access these 2 places to see if I can do anything.

I think I will now go to the "support communities >/ Mac OS & System Software / macOS Mojave to see if anyone there can come up with something?

Desperate Den

BDAqua

1. Am still getting "saving 1 of 526 Drafts 3.64 GB.

Nothing in icloud Drafts, yahoo Drafts or btinternet Drafts. BTinternet shows 2 folders.....Draft and Drafts!! ....both 0 content.

"On My Mac" does not show the subfolder "Drafts"........how do you get it to show???

1. What exactly is V2, V6 etc? What are they, what information do they hold and can the information/files, whatever they are, be just deleted? (If they may be causing the problem).

1. Thanks for the help so far. Any idea how long it might be before Apple does a fix to whatever is causing this problem??

Dennis

1. On My Mac...Drafts. Done that..... It just says can't create because Drafts already exists. (but still does not show) How do I unhide Drafts in On My Mac?
2. In the past I have found that being able to open a draft of an email very useful to continue answering a question after partial info being put in it then having to further research.
3. V6 contents.... is there likely to be anything in it that is causing the problem and what do I look for??

Where do we go from here?????? getting desperate as everything going so slow.

I operate 4 mail accounts, the screenshot shows there is a 5th folder inside Drafts entitled "On My Mac". It's empty and to my knowledge has never had anything in it.

In the separate On My Mac folder lower down, there is no "Drafts" folder inside. The Import folder contains only some old e-mails I manually carried over that I need for reference. The Notes folder is empty (and always was, I think) and the rest is 5 folders of Recovered Messages, 4 for the mail accounts and another empty one for "On My Mac".

So no Drafts folder in On My Mac....

And I still have the "Saving 1 of 71 Drafts" message in the bottom left....

I went to Mailbox Behaviours in Accounts in Preferences on all of my 4 mailboxes and switched the "Draft Mailbox" choice on each to the "Drafts" folder in "On My Mac" option (i.e. NOT the iCloud option).

The good news is that the "Saving drafts" doom loop appears to have been eliminated. Thank you and others who find this page in the future should definitely try the above route first to eliminate the "Saving Drafts" fault.

However, it is worth noting that the mailbox layout it now defaults to involves showing individual mailboxes separately under On My Mac, not in it. See pic below;

Each of the 4 mailboxes under On My Mac can be closed with the "hide" command, I have pictured them all open so you can see which 3 folders are inside (the last one is a non-Apple box).

For now, this seems to have fixed the problem and I am very grateful. Given how many people have reported the Saving Drafts problem, it is disappointing that Apple have not changed their default Mail settings for Drafts in Mojave so this problem does not arise.

Thank you.

I can't make your tip work sadly. I'm running Mojave on a late-2018 MBP and I have the "Saving 1 of 71 Drafts" message constantly in the bottom left corner of Mail, even though I don't have 150 drafts. I do create e-mails with large attachments regularly so maybe that is the cause.

Elsewhere an alternative solution to the problem was posted that involved changing the settings in Mailbox Behaviours so that Drafts were only saved on the Mac, not in the Cloud. I haven't found a way to make that work either....

Confusingly, there is already an On My Mac folder in my Drafts folder, although there's nothing in it.

But there isn't a Drafts folder in my On My Mac folder. That On My Mac folder has various Recovered Messages folders for my active mailboxes and has one other folder where I store some old E-Mails.

Why would creating a new Drafts folder there help the problem...?

When you say "point your drafts to that Draft folder", I presume you mean change the choice of Draft folder in Mail>Preferences>Accounts>Mailbox Behaviours...?

When I looked at that setting a moment ago, I saw that there is an option to choose the "Drafts" folder in On My Mac in Mailbox Behaviours, in all 4 mailboxes. I haven't created those Drafts folders, they must have been in there all along, but hidden.

So if I change in Mailbox Behaviour the choice of Draft for each of my 4 boxes to the Drafts folder in On My Mac, will my existing drafts re-appear in 4 new Drafts boxes in On My Mac...?

MacBook Air (2014) with updated OS Mojave 10.14.3

Oh dear....same problem here and tried to follow above cure but it did not work. Still saving 527 of 1,052 drafts 7.67 GB.

"On my Mac" does not show a Drafts folder.....but when I try to create one it says "cannot create already exists"

clicking on Mail>Preferences>Accounts>Mailbox Behaviours ...each of my 3 accounts (icloud, Yahoo, Btinternet) when drafts is selected shows that you can select .....Draft....Drafts......or On MY Mac (subfolder) Drafts.

I have selected On My Mac...Drafts for each of the 3 accounts

But still the problem exists and still the On MY Mac does not show Drafts under it (just Deleted messages and recovered messages folders.

Somewhere someone else says cured by another process (but think this was in a different OS) by doing something in "Library/Mail/V5......../......../Data/5/2/messages

That process was beyond my comprehension as I do not have a clue how to get to the "Library" referred to and just could not follow the listed steps they used......"Find your Drafts folder in your home directory" HOW??

The following instructions may make sense if I can get over the first hurdle?

Somewhere else has an instruction to go to Finder and go to path Library by holding Option/Alt key while clicking "GO" in upper menu bar...........I can see no "GO".........so yet again getting nowhere.

Would someone out there please please give a way of curing the problem on my MacBook Air OS Mujave using the simplest of terminology that can be followed assuming a novice is following. Please no "go to" without saying how.

Perhaps it would help if someone could explain (in simpler terms) what is happening and why. Where all these ""Drafts"" are.....why they are being transferred/saved and from where to where.

My problem also only started recently (few days/week or so ago)....was it after an update to Mojave??

Terribly frustrated

Dennis

Hi Dennis, Apple has hidden our Users' Libraries from us...

Temporary access to the hidden User Library

Method 1:

From the Finder, select the Go menu at top of the screen, and choose Go to Folder.

In the window that opens, enter ~/Library, and click Go.

Method 2:

Go to the Finder (or desktop).

Hold the Option key on your keyboard, and click the Go menu at the top of the screen.

With the Go menu open, you'll notice that pressing and releasing Option will display or hide the Library choice in this menu.

Select Library from the Go menu (while holding down Option) to access the hidden folder.

Dennis - you have my complete sympathy. Despite over 20 years of exposure to Apple products, some small problems (in otherwise wonderful machines) are so frustrating and appear completely illogical. I am certainly no geek, just battle-hardened.....

My guess as to why our Apples are caught in this "doom loop" of constantly Saving Drafts is that there is a coding flaw in the OS (or in Mail) concerning how our machines auto-save their files up to iCloud. I suspect our machines are constantly trying to verify multiple versions of the same Drafts and then getting confused by trying to save a being-saved file. If that makes sense...

What BDAcqua kindly proposed here as a solution for me was to effectively stop my machine faffing around (technical term...) persistently trying to save Drafts up to iCloud. My Drafts are now saved only to my MBP, not to iCloud and the dreaded Saving Drafts message has finally gone from the bottom left-hand corner of Mail.

If you go into Mail>Preferences>Accounts>Mailbox Behaviours, you will see "drafts Mailbox" as the first of the 5 Mailbox settings. If you click the tab, you should be faced with 2 main folder options from which to choose; "iCloud" and "On My Mac", with sub-folders inside them.

What I did was to choose the "Drafts" folder that should be visible as a (possibly the only) sub-folder in "On My Mac". Choosing this destination should stop the machine trying to save its Drafts constantly to iCloud.

There is one further task an Apple Techie taught me years ago to do with Mail. After closing the Preferences box above, quit Mail. Make sure the tiny blob (technical term) under the Mail icon in your dock has disappeared. Then relaunch Mail. This is because some changes to Mail need it to be restarted for them to take effect. This includes deleting certain files.

I hope this is helpful...

W D

WD and BDAqua. thanks for help so far. The fog is gradually clearing.....I can see 6 foot now instead of 3 inches!

Unfortunately age is not on my side as now my memory cells virtually cease to function and it is taking me longer to understand and grasp concepts. I have had to print out the various helpful suggestions from various people (therein lies another saga...printing out!!)

I accessed Mail..........Mailbox Behaviours and for the 3 accounts selected where drafts stored to "MY Mac subfolder Drafts."

Closed down MAIL immediately to allow changes to implement (as advised). Re-opened MAIL app and STILL get "saving 1 of 526 Drafts 3.84GB. This has stayed the same for about 1 hour or so (previously when saving X of thousands of drafts, the X gradually counted up........last memory of it was around 17 of a thousand or so.

So no cure yet.

Back to the drawing board? Is the fact that I am on Mojave 10.14.3 rather than High Sierra .....which is what this conversation is listed under of any significance?

I still do not understand what is in the Library/Mail/V?........I had a V2 and a V6 folder with some files(?) with labels that were meaningless. I wonder if I should have deleted them all? I do not like deleting files/folders that I do not understand what they are.

Dennis

Dennis, In Mail choose Mailbox>New Mailbox...>On My Mac and name it Drafts, then redirect all your Drafts to that box... may have to quit & restart Mail.

The V folder are where most of your Mail doings are kept, the number after the V will depend on what OS version you're running. Deleting stuff there we have to be careful.

I doubt Apple is going to fix it since it's not a common problem, we must fix whatever is abnormal.

Yes I have done that and each of my 3 mail accounts has "On My Mac" Drafts selected (as shown in your example).

After I had done that I did shut down Mail and restarted Mail.

If Drafts doesn't show in On My Mac in the sidebar, how would one be able to open a draft to continue working on it to send????

Very good question, I never noticed that before, haven't actually used Drafts since 10.4.11

But, once I composed an eMail , did not Send it & closed the compose window it asked to save a draft, did that & magically a Drafts folder for all my accounts showed up under the Inbox folder, & only one showed the Draft in it.