Mail on mac stuck 'moving messages'

This link did it for me! I didn't have to rebuild or reindex, just just emptied trash and junk. Pointed Drafts to just store on the Mac local drive. Took all accounts offline, waited, then back online. I watched the Activity window and the hung items eventually disappeared.

https://appletoolbox.com/mac-mail-app-always-downloading-fix/#ReIndex_Your_Mail

I had the same problem and eventually managed to "fix" it. Two suggestions.

First, check out this how-to article, which covers quite a few things you can try in Mail.app that I was not aware of, such as looking at the Activity window and Rebuild. Link: https://appletoolbox.com/mac-mail-app-always-downloading-fix

Unfortunately, none of this fixed the problem for me. What I eventually did: Seeing that the problem seems to be related to Exchange servers, I added it as IMAP instead. I unchecked "Mail" for the problematic server in Internet Accounts, so to still use Exchange for contacts, calendars, etc. Then I added the email account of that server separately, using IMAP. So far this seems to work as a solution. Although it doesn't fix the underlying Exchange server issues, it essentially circumvents then, allowing me to move mails around again.

I hope that is helpful for someone.

This worked for my mid-2012 macbook pro, high sierra. My envelop files were under: Finder, Shift, Command & "G" to path ~/Library/Mail/V5/MailData/ . I got scared when I opened Mail and it started importing 13,642 messages but after 1/2 hour the app opened. Then downloaded 380 messages. To my surprise there were only duplicate messages in the inbox. After that all was good. It moves messages now in a flash when I delete them.

thanks

My similar issue was with all Mail accounts, especially when deleting or moving a batch of emails hosted on an IMAP server. The problem started after setting up an iCloud email account.

Looking at the iCloud account in Mail Prefs, and then Mailbox Behaviours I eventually noticed that 'Erase Deleted messages' had defaulted to 'Never'. Changing to 'Automatically' solved the problem, though why it should affect all the other Mail accounts I've no idea.

Hope this helps someone.

Have you installed all recent software updates from Apple? My Mac OS Apple Mail version has changed to Version 13.4 (3608.80.23.2.2) (from Version 13.0 (3608.60.0.2.5) - it looks like Apple may have released a fix for this problem.. I have been deleting emails from Mac OS Apple Mail, it seems to be working fine ... for now at least.. although I am not pushing it too much.. only deleting 1 or 2 mails at a time instead of hitting delete on multiple messages because I don't want it getting stuck again!

So the solution would seem to be: Remove and Re-install all exchange accounts, make sure your software is up-to-date, keep your fingers crossed!

I had the exact same problem and after searching a solution online for a few hours, I finally found it here: https://appletoolbox.com/mac-mail-app-always-downloading-fix/#ReIndex_Your_Mail

This is the only thing that worked for me. And I've tried quite a bit of tricks...

Hope this helps

PJ

Update on my original post: I also tried starting Mail with the shift key and that did not solve my problem. After talking with Apple again and then with the server host (GoDaddy) I found out that Apple is aware of the problem and for the time being is recommending that I switch from Exchange to IMAP. I did that, and now my mailboxes are syncing just fine.

And now if I could get Apple to revert to its way of managing column display and if the developer of MailHub would continue to update his product I'd be reasonably happy with Apple Mail!

I had a similar issue where messages from office365 were stuck moving to a local mail folder on my Mac. I saw the messages in the move to folder but they were empty and they would never move over, and the message "moving messages" would not go away. The first thing I tried was to sync my account, this did nothing as far as I could tell. The next thing I did was disable my 2 rules that were moving messages to the local mailbox. The last thing I did was delete the 68 empty messages that showed as a shell in the local mailbox. All of a sudden it started counting off the messages and it no longer says moving messages. FYI it didn't move the messages, but I didn't expect it to. I stopped mail and restarted mail each time. I have now re-enabled my email rules and hopefully this won't happen again. I hope it works for you!

Thank you for all the help… this was happening to me too! I first quit mail, then reopened it holding the SHIFT key. Then I closed all my Microsoft applications like Excel and Word etc… and tada! It all got fixed. Now all my devices are up to date and the moving messages stopped after about 5 minutes. Doing both of these worked!!!!

I have had this several times and had hours on the phone with support

... finally found that if I simply delete all the messages in my trash/bin/junk on all my devices together it clears itself...

how simple :)

This issue started for me after deleting large amounts of mail from my inbox. I tried shutting mail down completely and restarting, but this yielded no results. Reading through the other answers and seeing wild ideas like deleting the entire mailbox and rebuilding it just seemed out of the question for me. So, I decided to right click and "Take account offline", one-by-one, to see if I could identify the offending account. Once I found it, the incessant "moving 1 of x" stopped. I took the account back online and have had no issues since. Pretty simple fix, at least for me! Hope this can help someone else.

My final solution was deleting the "Envelope index" files described here

Have you tried this?

Here are 2 links that might help.

https://www.emailfix.org/error/apple-mail-moving-messages-stuck.html

https://c-command.com/spamsieve/help/how-can-i-rebuild-apple

Thanks for this - it worked for me. I had a couple of Rules set up locally in Mac Mail for my Exchange account. Now those are set to run on the Exchange server itself, and all appears to be well.

Switching off and then on junk filtering solved the issue. Hope this helps.