Mail crashes only when I delete emails

I've been experiencing this problem with Mail for months and have tried every possible solution, including working with Apple engineers, without success. On my own, I made a simple change in Mail Preferences>Accounts>Mailbox Behaviors. I set my iCloud and me.com accounts so that the Junk Mailbox is Junk under On My Mac and Erase junk messages after one day. I set the Trash Mailbox to Trash under On My Mac and Erase deleted messages Never. I used the same settings for my earthlink.net IMAP accounts and Mail hasn't crashed for the past three days even when I use select all and batch delete my Junk folders and Trash folders. Like I said, even the Apple engineers couldn't come up with a solution and I still can't believe this is all it took... but so far, so good on my Mac Pro running High Sierra.

Try – as I did (identical problem) – "tadziodue's" fix, originally posted 15th June. It's worked for me (for exactly a month, now).

Jun 15, 2020 12:06 PM in response to nick baccante

I've been experiencing this problem with Mail for months and have tried every possible solution, including working with Apple engineers, without success. On my own, I made a simple change in Mail Preferences>Accounts>Mailbox Behaviors. I set my iCloud and me.com accounts so that the Junk Mailbox is Junk under On My Mac and Erase junk messages after one day. I set the Trash Mailbox to Trash under On My Mac and Erase deleted messages Never. I used the same settings for my earthlink.net IMAP accounts and Mail hasn't crashed for the past three days even when I use select all and batch delete my Junk folders and Trash folders. Like I said, even the Apple engineers couldn't come up with a solution and I still can't believe this is all it took... but so far, so good on my Mac Pro running High Sierra.

Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode?

Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.

OK, good work, a Malformed eMail can makeMail crash.

Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.

If still no good Disconnect from the Internet, then start Mail, look for the last rec'd eMail.

Quit Mail & login to your WebMail in a Browser, if possible delete any later eMails there after the last rec'd one on the Mac.

I too have had this problem for more than a month. I have been sending the crash reports to Apple, but it didn't seem like anything was being done about it. I am running 10.13.6 (17G66) and have the exact same problem. When I tried to empty the trash in Mail.app, it crashes.

Worse, today it crashed while I was composing an email. It is very disappointing to experience crashes on a regular basis. I'm not accustomed to this behavior from Apple. Windows? Always.

I tried getting rid of the Library files, reset to NVRAM, clear out all of my emails (not an easy task), reinstalled High Sierra, and none of it worked.

I did set the Sent, Junk, and Trash folders to my local Mac, but I just tried the solution above: Mail, Preferences, Accounts, Mailbox Behaviors, set Junk and Trash mailboxes to erase deleted messages to Never. And it has worked at least once.

Here's hoping (And wishing I didn't have to hope)

I have the same operating system on a 2011 mid year iMac. I installed Norton360 on my computer about a year ago and it seems that little by little it became more problematic with several reinstallations because of poor performance, which was the fix prescribed by Norton. I don't think it plays well with the older OS and it's not beneficial for them to use up resources to fix it.

I removed it recently, and it seems that the mail problems have disappeared. If you are using this or other VPN software (I haven't used another, so I just don't know) you might want to do an uninstall and see if it makes your computer run better.

This worked for me, for now:

Changes per OS...

Since Sierra, Mail is in V4

Since El Capitan, Mail is in V3

All the rest will be the same.

If your machine has been upgraded through these OSes, you may have all 3 folders.

Try clearing the saved state, rebuilding & reindexing the database...

Clear Saved State

• Switch to Finder, Cmd ⌘ N for a new window, then Cmd ⌘ Shift ⇧ G for Go To...
• copy/paste ~/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.mail.savedState then Enter ⌅
• This is an alias to the real location, so Right-click & Show Original
• Delete the entire com.apple.mail.savedState folder.

So many people suffering through the exact same problem. Please, how about some help,

Apple? I tried this:

"When you rebuilt the mailbox did you also get it to re-index? 

Quit mail, then ~/Library/Mail/V6/MailData/ delete all the Envelope Index files [duplicate to the desktop first for safety] & re-launch Mail. 

The rebuild may take some time"

and it worked for a few rounds of emptying the trash, but then the problem came back.

Since this is still an issue for me, I decided to turn off the setting Erase deleted messages "After on month" to "Never" in the Mail/Preferences/Accounts tab for all my accounts. I now just let the mail servers automatically delete the trash mail. Gmail automatically empties trash mail on the server every 30 days. Just let the server end delete the messages and not have the Mail app do it, and this should stop the Mail app crashes when deleting bulk trash. Hope this helps.

Yikes! When you open preferences again is the Never setting now set, or still set to your previous setting? If you have more than one email account, can you set any of them to Never without Mail crashing? If not, there may be a problem with your Mail app. You can try to locate the problem by opening the Console app, then in Mail try setting the preference to Never. If Mail crashes the Console app should include crash data that may give you a clue as to why Mail is crashing.

I'd start a new topic so we don't get confused with different systems or causes, then...

You can save us asking dozens of questions by submitting a report...

EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Pastebin is a good place to paste the whole report if you capture the URL while there…

https://pastebin.com/

This fix is still working for me - for the most part. I've noticed that if I empty the me.com Junk folder under On My Mac instead of just letting that junk mail delete automatically after one day (as per settings described above), my Mail will still crash when I click on the Trash to empty it. This doesn't happen for any other account and if I don't bother with the me.com Junk folder, it deletes itself after one day with no problem. So it's definitely tied to the me.com Junk Mail folder On My Mac, which makes it an Apple problem someone there should try a bit (a lot) harder to fix. If I change the Mail Preferences so that the me.com Junk folder is not On My Mac, then the crashing happens everytime I empty it or empty my Trash. I see there's a new High Sierra update available as of yesterday. I keep hoping one of these updates will address this problem. And that Apple will make up with Nvidia someday so I can finally get past High Sierra!

I suddenly started having this problem about two weeks ago.

Mail only crashes when I am emptying iCloud email. I have three other IMAP accounts set up in Mail and I can happily empty the deleted messages in those and Mail works perfectly. It is only when emptying trash for the iCloud account in Mail. The crash occurs if I right-click on the iCloud account trash and select Erase Deleted Items ..., go to the Mailbox menu and select Erase Deleted Items (either all accounts or the single account), or if I go into the Trash mailbox, select all and press delete. All options cause the crash and generate a similar error message: "Crashed Thread: 14 Dispatch queue: IMAPNetworkTaskHandler queue :: NSOperation 0x7f9aaee39db0 (QOS: USER_INITIATED)"

I've also noticed that moving a group of messages from the iCloud inbox to trash is very slow at times. When deleting from Gmail or Comcast accounts, the message about moving the emails never even appears it happens so quickly; not so with the iCloud account.

This is happening both on my MBP running El Capitan and my iMac running High Sierra. And, the issue started on both computers at essentially the same time. I have rebuilt mailboxes, deleted the index so it would be rebuilt and even went so far as to turn off iCloud email (thereby deleting the account) and then turned it back on so that all the many thousands of emails were re-downloaded from iCloud ... all to no avail.

I am an Apple specialist so I have gone through both computers with a fine tooth comb searching for issues. Given that the error is always the IMAPNetworkTaskHandler, and the fact that this issue is occurring on multiple operating systems, I believe that the problem is at the server end. Like others, I have managed to have the problem disappear for a day or three, but the problem always comes back and it's always the iCloud IMAP account, none of the other three. Of course, calling AppleCare they will tell you that your computer is broken even though the issue is apparent on multiple computers.

As far as deleting the email at iCloud ... that works but upon launching Mail (after emptying trash at icloud.com), there is a crash as soon as Mail tries to synchronize the fact that the Trash is now empty, generating the same IMAPNetworkTaskHandler error.

Not much help, I know ... :(