Mail app crashes every time on Catalina

I've had problems with Mail randomly crashing in Mohave and Catalina when writing emails with docx and pdf attachments. Today, Mail started crashing immediately upon opening. Don't know if the two issues are related. I found this remedy on another Apple support thread which seems to have fixed the crash-on-open problem:

1. Using Finder remove the entire Mail folder to trash from  ~/Library
2. When you restart your MacBook and launch Mail, it will automatically build your Mailboxes and folders and populate it with your old Mail.

I have had the same problem (and many others) ever since installing Catalina.

I would add this:

When Mail (and Firefox) hang, their dock icons indicate they are closed. Yet when I call up the list of open apps to Force Close, I see both as open. Neither will reopen once they start hanging. Mail's dock icon bounces for a while, then stops. Crash reports stop coming at this point.

I've run disk first aid, including in safe mode, and still get the problem. I've re-installed Catalina twice (10.15.2, I went to it straight from 10.14), to no avail.

Have attached screenshot of Activity Monitor showing Disk and data activity.

IMac, late 2012

32 GB RAM

Catalina 10.15.2

The solution posted here by jprazak (this same solution now appears in many other sites) unfortunately did not work for me either; not at all. Within minutes I'd get the same "out of application memory" message (due to Mail) and Mail would crash even before I could do a Force Quit.

Before giving up and downgrading from Catalina, I tried one more thing:

I moved the entire Mail folder to trash from ~/Library, did a restart and launched Mail.

That worked!!

Mail rebuilt my mailboxes and folders and populated them with my mail with no problems. No "out of memory" message and no Mail application crash. Woo! :)

Since upgrading to Catalina Mail is unusable on my iMac. It takes about 30 seconds before it hangs, usually when I'm in the middle of typing a message, then is totally unresponsive, so I have no option but to force quit.

I've tried the process shown on several sites and here by jprazak of moving files out of my library, as well as the nuclear option of moving the entire mail folder to trash by ramblin_man also on here. So far all that's changed is the number of seconds before Mail hangs again!

I'm sending crash reports to Apple each time, but am disappointed that nothing seems to be happening. This can't be normal.

Any other ideas? Or do we just wait and hope for an update that fixes this soon?

Thanks in advance.

imac late 2013 2.9ghz quad-core intel core i5

macOS Catalina 10.15.1

I tried all of the suggestions in this thread and nothing helped. The last thing I did was disable all of my email accounts (6), restarted my MacBook Pro(Late 2013) and re-enabled accounts one at a time saving the likely suspect for last. Mail worked properly for each account. It continued to work after enabling the final account. I have no idea why, but it worked and has continued to work for 3 days now.

Thank you so much. I've been struggling with this problem since the day I updated to Catalina. Like you, I have followed all the useless advice on how to fix the problem with no success at all until I came across your post. I wish I could give you a friggin' medal!

I have had this issue with Mail freezing with spinning beach ball happening after a few minutes after opening mail. Ever since I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Catalina, tried many things to solve. BUT just yesterday an update came through for Mac OS which briefly talkes about security updates etc , BUT, anyway my problem has been mysteriously solved as of the update this morning !! I can only assume there was a fix in this latest update , now running 10.15.2 (19C57)

Not sure whether you are now sorted but after a fruitless call to Apple support where they completely re-installed Catalina - I found my own solution. I'm NOT a geek so don't ask me why it works, it just did.

I made a copy of the folder in the user/library/mail/V7 - this V7 folder contained all my mailboxes (dozens with 100s of mails in each one for many years!)

I then trashed the V7 folder in my library and re-started Apple Mail. Mail then opened instantly but had none of my customised mail boxes or content. I then overwrote the new V7 folder with my copy. Apple Mail restarted & still thankfully worked. The mailboxes were still not there, so I manually re-imported all my mailboxes through FILE / IMPORT MAILBOXES and selected Apple Mail option to import mboxes. You can see all your mailbox names there. It painfully created subfolders which I had to manually select & drag messages from these numerically named subfolders, into my own, named top level folders before deleting the now empty subfolders, but having done that everything is now working. Hope this helps.

All of the above worked for a short peroid of time, but after running mail again for a couple of hours it's starts again to crash. once crashed I can open it again and the crashes are within minutes. Deleting the Library Mail folder has brought the best results, but until apple comes up with a solution or an update I will be forced to use Microsoft Outlook because that works.

My biggest issue is why can't Mail de uninstalled and installed again without having to make a complete new install of the OS?

After all attempts failed (deleted files as recommended, reinstalled Catalina), I just trashed the entire Mail folder in the Library (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread). Since my entire Mac is synched with iCloud, it all came back after restarting and rebuilding the mailbox, even the personal folders. So far so good.

I continue to have the irritating problem of the Mail app crashing, even now with the latest 10.15.4 Catalina release installed. How is it that Apple seems to be unaware of this problem with all of the crash reports that we're automatically submitting to them every time it happens?

I see some suggestion here of removing all of my mail accounts (about 6 or so active, most gmail and some exchange) and reinstalling them. Has that actually worked for anyone in the long run?

It helped me too - thank you SO much. Saved my sanity!

...but it keeps crashing. So much so that I now have a "cheat sheet" of the steps involved in the process described in that page on my desktop.

And it's happening more and more often. I'm going insane! I have multiple accounts, so using an app like Apple Mail is really my only option. I don't want to have to log in to and then out of multiple Google accounts AND my work email online in order to check mail!