Question: Apple Mail Preferences Blank or Empty - SOLVED
Apparently Apple thinks a topic 7 months old is too old to respond to, so I had to make a new thread to post my solution.
A client upgraded to High Sierra and suddenly their Apple Mail app would not show any options in the Preferences window. Searching the internet, apparently this is not a unique problem. Worse yet, the few solutions that are posted simply recommend that you wipe out your entire Mail data & preferences and start fresh with no prior data. A truly Apple Certified solution! Delete everything and then it starts to work!
First, I tried removing the plist file alone and that returned Preferences visibility. There is no need to wipe out all your data. Because I had a bit of free time thanks to the Rona and decided to divide and conquer the preferences. Here is the solution:
- Find the preferences file com.apple.mail.plist - It is typically located at ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail but could be located elsewhere
- Quit Apple Mail app
- Drag com.apple.mail.plist to Desktop - it is not editable inside the container
- Use your favorite plist editor to remove the following entries
ActiveEditors
ActiveSingleViewers
ActiveSingleViewers-v2
ActiveViewers
ActiveViewers-v2
CalSuccessfulLaunchTimestampPreferenceKey
CheckedForOldLSMMapFile
ColorQuoterColorList
ConversationViewNextMessageDirection
ConversationViewSortDescending
CurrentTransferMailboxPath
CurrentTransferMailboxURLString
- Save changes
- Drag plist file back to the original folder
- Open Mail
- Notice that Preferences is still blank / empty
- Quit Mail
- Open Mail
- Problem solved!
There might be a fewer number of plist entries to be deleted, and someone is welcome to help figure out what the exact culprit is, but these settings appear to have almost no impact on Mail usage after the fix is applied.
Additionally, one could create a terminal .command file or AppleScript to delete these individual entries, but since this is a one-time fix I didn't bother taking this project further.
Maybe Apple can learn from this post and fix their own bug! I won't hold my breath.
