Mac Mail seriously corrupted; technical advice needed
I'm trying to repair my Mum's Mac (HighSierra 10.13.6) using TeamViewer, from a Win PC, 8000 km away from the machine :-(
He mac has been unusable for past 3 weeks, until I could get someone in front of the keyboard and start in safe mode. I've done a system update/refresh to 10.13.6 to make sure there wasn't a corrupted update. Completed and rebooted fine.
The Mac now works fine, EXCEPT Mail which starts but hogs memory and disk until the Mac becomes unusable.
I went on tech websites, and following instructions I've deleted com.apple.mail.plist / com.apple.mail-shared.plist (~/Library/Preferences) and ALL the Envelope Index files in ~/Library/Mail/V5/MailData.
I deleted the Mac Icon from the taskbar, and replaced with an icon I had previously dragged from Application folder onto desktop.
I also went onto Gmail using FF, and emptied her inbox to makes sure there was no problematic emails waiting to download. Finally, I went into Mac preferences and unticked her email/address book/calendar account with Gmail, so that Max does not try to synchronize anything when I open Mail again
When I start Mail, it starts as if this was a new install, and offers to "import existing email". I must accept otherwise the procedure will not move forward. It finds 23 messages and start to import them (very odd: there should be either 0 if the deletes above worked, or several 100's if it finds email data files on disk).
Then 1) The CPU goes up to 100% within seconds, and stays there until I kill Mail.
2) Memory usage grows linearly over time, roughly 1 GB every 30 seconds. When I reach 7.5GB mac OS stops responding. 3) I have no choice but to click on CANCEL, which takes roughly one minute to eventually cancel and kill the task from within Mail. The Mac becomes responsive again..
If I do this a few times, the initial number of email found increases by 1 at each attempt (I'm now at 30 emails to import). Going back to the folder containing Envelope Index files, there is now a dozen temp files with cryptic names and numbers (all starting with Envelope Index). Some files are a few kb, other are several 100 MB and one is even 1.5 GB.
I'm running out of patience and Mac IT skills. All the mails and contacts are on Google, and can easily be re-downloaded.
I would be grateful to anyone with a great idea on what I am doing wrong (remember, I am NOT in front of keyboard and Mum is 76...), or instructions for whacking and reinstalling Mail from scratch?
Do not propose Thunderbird; I know how to do that, but I can't teach my Mum how to use another app with lots of new menus :-(
Thanks to all