Mail quits on sending email. The email gets sent before it quits and Mail reopens and seems to work fine - for awhile. This happens periodically, but not every time. And it doesn't happen in my wife's account on this machine. OS X Monterey 12.6.1. I of course put this in the report to Apple each time.
Suggestions welcome.
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 12.6
I understand that sending an email message occasionally causes the Mail app to "unexpectedly quit" and that you definitively isolated that problem to your User Account.
Try rebuilding Mail's mailboxes according to Rebuild mailboxes in Mail on Mac - Apple Support. That action rebuilds the database that keeps each Mailbox organized. You can rebuild just the Outbox, the All Sent Mailbox, or all Mailboxes. I'd rebuild all of them.
I understand that sending an email message occasionally causes the Mail app to "unexpectedly quit" and that you definitively isolated that problem to your User Account.
Try rebuilding Mail's mailboxes according to Rebuild mailboxes in Mail on Mac - Apple Support. That action rebuilds the database that keeps each Mailbox organized. You can rebuild just the Outbox, the All Sent Mailbox, or all Mailboxes. I'd rebuild all of them.
Log files themselves are considered expendable and are deleted when a Mac needs the space they occupy, but in general yes you can delete log files. Don't delete any enclosing folders because macOS expects them to be present, and might not re-create them if they are absent.
The symptoms you describe suggest something else is going on. Not only should "show activity" reveal the fact Mail is re-downloading messages from an IMAP server when you rebuild Mailboxes, (see the example below), the fact log files appear to be growing out of control is not normal.
Perhaps restarting your Mac in "Safe Mode" may help: How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support. Do that, use your Mac for a few minutes while in that mode, then reboot normally (not "Safe Mode").
I suspect we may need to perform additional investigation, and that may lead to the necessity to contact Apple.
One more thing to suggest before giving up and calling Apple Support. Despite the implications of its title If you can’t send or receive email on your Mac - Apple Support suggests one last step is to Remove your email account, then add it back. This is the Mail equivalent of "turning it off and on again" and is considered the gold standard of fixing email account connection problems. If all else fails Apple is almost certain to have you do it, so you might as well do it anyway.
Be sure to heed the Important note in the first document.
I see activity when mail is checked, but not when I try to rebuild mailboxes. I have 4 gmail account and one mindspring (yes, still from EarthLink) account. All are using IMAP to connect. Is there something about gmail or IMAP accounts that cause this behavior?
Also is Mail is creating huge log files such that when I try to open them with TextEdit I sometime get warnings about running out of memory. would that cause Mail to quit when it runs up against memory issues?
Can I delete those log files and start over?
Restarted in safe mode, went into both accounts, moved the logs out of the folder, and Mail created logs that are much smaller. That seemed to speed things up. Then turned logging off. Went back to normal login in the Mac accounts and tried rebuilding and several emails from the last year posed up as unread. Many from May and several from the last two weeks. In any event, while it seems that the mailboxes have been rebuilt, in my wife's account rebuild behaves as you describe (shows up in the activity window), while in my account, only one of my email accounts behaves like that. It is the mindspring account that both of us access from our individual Mac accounts.
More thoughts?
Yes, though you might not like some of them. If you did not already try removing the affected Accounts and adding them again, that's a necessary and probably unpleasant step. Unpleasant because like many other formerly "free" email services Earthlink (and even some paid ones) got out of the email business because there's no money in it. Some other company (probably Google) now handles all @mindspring.com traffic, which of course means they're reading your emails to harvest personal information they can sell.
No matter though, I understand your desire to keep perfectly good @mindspring addresses and that's where I would like to help. Unfortunately Earthlink's most updated instructions for Mail are woefully outdated:
https://help.earthlink.net/portal/en/kb/articles/mail-for-mac-os-x-10-8-5
That Mail version must be a decade old. Those instructions are not likely to work at all. Adding that Account to Mail again is likely to require their support, which I started with here:
https://help.earthlink.net/portal/en/kb/articles/how-to-add-a-new-email-to-your-account
That's what led to the unhelpful setup instructions above. Perhaps their chat or phone support has more updated instructions.
Here are my thoughts, since you asked. Email is supposed to be easy. If an email service too becomes difficult to use, or if the "free" service they provided in the past turns evil, abandon it.
I have many, many mailboxes. Can you rebuild multiple mailboxes at once? I tried to select 2 and rebuild, but the feedback on the process is awful. I have no idea if it worked.
Yes, you can. You can observe Mail's activity using ⌘ ⌥ 0 (command option zero).
mail quits on sending email
