Apple Mail Crashes in Ventura

I wanted to give everyone an update on my progress. I, too, called Apple Support and it was forwarded to a senior adviser (engineer). They had me look for and drag these items to the desktop: LaunchAgents library, com.apple startupitems, daemons, and Microsoft work kernel extensions. None of this helped. I ended up completing and sending the results of two CaptureData sessions to Apple engineering. This resulted in me deleting Norton from my computer. None of these items resolved the issue. My email would still crash immediately when entering the first character into the search engine. In the end, they recommended me starting over. Yes, erasing the ssd and reinstalling the os. I asked about backing up my email so that I could have all of my dragged emails (I have to have those for work). They said that the emails may be part of the problem. I have tens of thousands of saved emails. I tested this theory by setting up a new user and importing the mail from the library. It searched all of my archived emails without any trouble or crashes using the new user account. So, the emails (or even the volume of them) are not the issue. I did end up starting over, but it is just much more difficult to get things back the way they were. Mail for example needs to be imported from the library by the Mac Mail program (a simple folder drag and dump won't suffice). Photos and music on the other hand don't need imports. These are best to use folder drags. Then, there are small things like artist artwork not showing up in Music (I know it is a first world problem) and many other things that are not as they were.

With all of that said, if you have used migration assistant over the years, I think it is safe to assume that you are bringing along software that you no longer use and may be causing problems. So, I am pretty much fully operational after all of that and feel as though all of the old stuff is gonzo - a clean slate. Sorry for the long message but hope it at least helps those that are having the same problem. Also, I am not sure if this matters or was part of the problem, but I had an old, inactive MobileMe account that showed up under internet accounts. When I would click on it, it would be blank. So, I could not delete it or see any of the information. For some reason, I feel like this had something to do with the crash. I thought about using terminal to rectify the problem, but that is above my level of understanding. I was a little worried that I would end up doing more harm.

One final thing is that I would set up a new user and import your mail messages. Then, search it and see if it crashes. You can always delete the account after and you don't even need to spend the time copying to an external hd if you have space on your existing hd. It is just a little tricky to find the user library (you have to share the folder and have an easy way to find the library). Again, wishing everyone with this problem the best!

I had a similar issue that popped up today, oddly enough, about four days after installing Ventura. The mail app would crash everytime I started entering text in the "search" field. It would crash 100% of the time. I tried rebooting, going into safe mode, hard reboot. Those things didn't work.

The fix was to go into Mail/Settings and then for each active mail account, uncheck the checkbox next to "enable this account". I closed the mail app, waited 30 seconds, and then restarted the mail app and the problem is gone. Hope that helps someone.

I do not know whether this might help, or if my problem might recur, but in reading "Mail App Quit Unexpectedly on Mac: 10 Ways to Fix it" on the site https://www.howtoisolve.com/mail-keeps-crashing-on-mac-macbook/, I noted point #6 [Delete Mail Preference Files].

I followed that recommendation, and deleted both files, rebooted, and opened Mail. The problem appears to be corrected. I hope that this might be of benefit to others.

My issues with Mail actually started with Monterey, but got much worse after I installed Ventura 13.0 and 13.0.1. I chased all the quick fix file deletions, rebuilding mailboxes, etc., to no avail and finally created a new user account for my Apple ID. PROBLEM SOLVED!

It's not a perfect solution and maybe it won't work for you, but I was able to launch my Mail app by holding the Shift key and opening the app.

It still crashes when being closed to the Dock but at least it's working.

Just to give a sense of the size of my mail folder:

V10 trimmed reports 28.22gb, for 300,676 items. The largest folder of older email is 75gb for 671,513 items. So I'd guess the mail folder that was handled just fine by the previous version of Mail.app had about 100gb and 1m items.

(I'm not bragging here, just trying to lay out the dimensions of my situation. I -hope- someone from Apple actually reads this stuff and is working on a fix. I'd sure like to get -all my email- back into Mail.app.)

In my case, it's quite clear from the crash reporting that the indexing thread is what's crashing, and that was a major area of change for Ventura, I believe. So deleting prefs, etc, would probably not change that.

MacMail was crashing every time I used the search function. I seem to have fixed the problem by unticking the boxes to prevent Mail from searching in the Junk and Deleted boxes.

Yes. It appears the indexing thread is crashing.

Thread 14 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.email.searchableIndex.batch.com.apple.mail.contentIndex

This is followed by what is probably a stack trace of 510 510 EmailCore 0x1c7c2da64 _parseComment + 352

[Edited by Moderator]

I've been having this annoying problem since I upgraded to Ventura. It makes the search in Mail unusable. Anyway, it seems this bug was fixed with the new 13.1 update. At least after the update, Mail is not crashing after a search.

I would try deactivating the mail account that’s impacted. Then close mail. Reopen mail, re-enable the account and see if that helps.

I removed a bunch of my largest email folders, deleted ~/library/mail/V10/MailData/Envelope Index-wal and relaunched mail. That worked, in that the app stopped crashing. However, now I'm missing A LARGE NUMBER of messages and mailboxes that I previously had access to.

It's consistent with the assessments that the problems are with handling specific content or amounts of content in the Mail folder... In my case, after reducing the number of messages, Mail has been stable. I have not seen the other search issues, but I note the 'status' window shows an "Indexing..." bar that has not moved past about the 5% mark since I installed Ventura.