Mail crashing after installing macOS Ventura (clean install)

I am at my wits end with the Mail.app and macOS Ventura - it seems no matter what I do to fix this issue it continues to crash. It seems that macOS Ventura is the problem. Mail.app never crashed on Monterey or on Big Sur. I was on a support call with Apple Support and went through just about every possible solution and nothing seems to work.

The issue was believed to have been resolved yesterday however, today while attempting to delete an email in the mail.app it crashed again. I was on the phone with a third support rep and had agreed to erase my SSD and reinstall macOS (clean install) I installed Monterey and before I added any other apps I upgraded to Ventura 13.2

I am expecting the tech to call me back within the next 10 minutes because as I was going through my email again the mail.app crashed and it does not matter which account I am in or which email I am looking at to delete it crashes.

Previously, I booted into safe boot and it still caused mail.app to crash. I have tried adding a test account on my MBA m1. to see if this issue was only on my account and the crash once again happened. I am seriously thinking Apple has bloated macOS too much instead of adding new features rather they are useful or not Apple would be better off making sure what we already have is working. Sadly, this is starting to remind me of Windows (chose your flavor)

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 13.2

Posted on Jan 24, 2023 2:53 PM

Top-ranking reply

Old Toad

Level 10

215,262 points

Posted on Feb 5, 2023 2:29 PM

With a fresh system and no user files it's beginning to sound more like some sort of hardware issue. The next step would be to take it into the nearest Apple Genius Bar or Apple Authorized Service Provider for free diagnostic tests. Preferably a Genius Bar.

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109 replies

Jeffios

Level 1

18 points

Feb 5, 2023 1:36 PM in response to MobileMeKevin

I have had issues with Mail crashing after updating my MacBook M1 Pro to 13.2. Certain emails were causing Mail to crash. I've done a clean install of 13.1 and Mail is working great. Here's another discussion that you might be interested in - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254606876?answerId=258612907022&cid=em-com-apple_email_question_helpfulanswer-go_to_the_discussion-en-us-11192020#258612907022

Jan 26, 2023 4:14 PM in response to MobileMeKevin

MobileMeKevin,

Can see that you're working hard on this and that you really want to find out why.

My suggestions - in addition to those of Old Toad - are:

re-install Ventura (13.2 was made available this week) using Recovery
create a new user account
in Safe Mode open Mail in that (new) user account; with no mail accounts like Outlook, Gmail or the like, no Bundles, and no 'Hide my email' etc

If Mail still crashes, then you may be one step closer to identifying Mail and/or the particular installation of macOS. Even then, there may be some other piece of software which is in some way responsible.

The Apple crashlogs (from /Applications/Utilities/Console) ought also to help in at least diagnosing what's provoking the crash.

I know that's a lot of work; but in the end you might save yourself more frustration.

Finger's crossed… :-)

Jan 26, 2023 4:27 PM in response to Mark Sealey

Hi Mark Sealey,

Thanks for your input and suggestions I am not sure if you have been able to read the full dialogue of what I have done already to attempt to fix the issues I am having. However, everything you have suggested has been done, tried and re-tried. Today marks the 5 Apple Support Rep I have chatted and talked to on the phone and with them sharing my screen. - Apple Support has all of the diagnostics and reports on my MBA-M1 Late 2020. All of the testing, installing and wiping the drive and installing a fresh copy of macOS Ventura 13.2 on a clean SSD has all been done. I don't think there is any more trouble shooting to be done - its become a known issue with Apple mail.app and Ventura 13.1 and 13.2 The other issue is with Safari and Hide my email both have been tested and the issues continue. I began posting this issue in this form hoping someone may have a solution but it appears everything that has been suggested has been done and some more than once.

The diagnostics tool that Old Toad had me download is falsely reporting that my MBA-M1 late 2020 has not been restarted in 2 days when actually it was 3 times today before I got his suggestion. Anyway, I have an option roll back to macOS Monterey where this isn't an issue or use the web base access to my email. thanks again for your input I appreciate it.

steve626

Level 6

13,749 points

Feb 4, 2023 1:01 PM in response to MobileMeKevin

Question regarding your troubleshooting steps:

When you did the "clean install of Ventura," did you migrate over your user accounts from a backup before testing Apple Mail again?

I ask because it would be of interest to know if, after a clean install, and creating a new blank administrator user (say, name it "admin"), but without migrating anything (accounts, files, anything) from the backup, so you basically have. factory fresh machine, Apple Mail still crashes? Maybe it would be too inconvenient to do this at this point, but I am asking because sometimes migration brings over something from the old system that is incompatible with the new MacOS.

If you have already tried this (clean install, trying Apple Mail with no users or anything from the previous setup, no migration etc.), then sorry to bother you about this, but I thought I would ask. We have thousands of users on Macs at my work location, about half on Ventura, half on Monterey, we are in the process of upgrading all users to Ventura. So I am concerned to see the problem you have been reporting on. Many of our users utilize Apple Mail, many others use MS-Outlook, but so far I have heard of no reports from our users of your problem. But what you are experiencing is disturbing and I hope to see a diagnosis and resolution soon.

etresoft

Level 9

56,290 points

Feb 6, 2023 7:00 PM in response to MobileMeKevin

MobileMeKevin wrote:

just an F.Y.I. you requested I follow these steps before and I did as well as provided the report from Etrecheck previously.

Not quite. I asked you for one of those Mail crash logs and you only provided the file name.

Here's the thing about software - it's not perfect. EtreCheck has a "bug" where it doesn't properly parse some newer Apple crash logs. That is probably why your Mail crash logs didn't appear in your EtreCheck report. I use the word "bug" in quotes because Apple keeps changing the format for its crash logs. Not that Apple ever documented it anyway. But regardless, EtreCheck is just a tool to make life here on the Apple Support Community a little less unpleasant. If we didn't have it, we would have to ask people to dig through there crash logs every time.

Now consider what Apple Mail has to deal with. Apple Mail doesn't have to deal with Apple's crazy composite JSON crash logs. Apple Mail has to deal with 100 GB of e-mail from all over the world. What are the chances that one person has one message that causes Mail to crash whenever the indexer hits it? It isn't that I'm surprised Apple Mail is crashing for you, I'm surprised it doesn't crash for more people.

But which e-mail is it? That's the $64k question. I don't care if Monterey or Spark didn't crash. That's irrelevant. Different software has different bugs. I'm sure that Monterey and Sparkmail would crash under other, equally obscure scenarios. But that fact isn't going to help you. The only thing that does have a very, very small chance of helping you is if you would post one of these crash logs.

mrp911

Level 1

8 points

Jan 26, 2023 9:04 AM in response to MobileMeKevin

Same issue here with my cox email. Gmail account works fine, crashing stops after I removed the cox email account. Worked fine until Ventura 13.1, and 13.2 still has the issue.

Apr 16, 2023 4:50 AM in response to Zelda01

Updating to 13.3.1 solved all my problems with Apple Mail.

Jan 25, 2023 9:24 AM in response to Randall_2023

Hi Randall,

Thank you for your reply and I certainly appreciate the steps you mentioned to try. Unfortunately, they do not work as I mentioned in my original post these and many other steps were taken. I spoke to a 4th Apple Support rep yesterday who again was stumped. We ended the conversation with work around to use iCloud mail website and or the Gmail and Outlook mail website if the crashing continues until Apple comes out with a fix for this issue.

Apparently I'm not the only one experiencing these issues A previous posting had 13 other users having a similar issue and while I followed each step per the Apple Support Rep. None of the solutions worked. I first tried my own steps before contacting Apple because I am a former I.T. specialist myself. This had me stumped I went so far as to download Malwarebytes, and an antivirus software just to see if it was in most unlikely event I somehow got a virus or malware on the M1 MacBook Air.

Once I installed each one and removed them before installing the other none of them found anything malious on my MacBook Air. I removed all three of the email accounts Apple, Gmail and Outlook and added all three back one at a time and the result was the Mail.app would crash even without an account set up. The issue will happen sporatically. Sometimes clicking on the Mail.app icon it will crash with or without any emails waiting to be viewed. It will crash after highlighting any of the messages in email from any account and clicking on the trash can in the Mail.app to delete or right clicking on any message and selecting to delete the message.

Next step was to create a test account on my Mac to log into to see if it was something loading on my account or if the it was system wide. It appears to be system wide. - As the Test account reacted the same way in the mail.app

I next shut down the MBA to boot into Safeboot and the issue reappeared. I done all of this from the advice from Apple support and nothing resolved the issue. The next step was to do a refresh of macOS 13.2 Ventura. After doing so the issue again appeared.

The next step was to make sure I had a Time Machine backup - I wiped the SSD and did a clean install of macOS 13.2 Ventura and again the problem continues to happen. I would love to blame a third party app however, at this time there are none installed its pure Apple Apps. So, in conclusion Apple Support and myself agree that it's a software glitch in 13.2 Ventura. and subsequently macOS Ventura 13, and 13.1 is where it all began.

Although Apple is not perfect and glitchy happen, I can't help to feel Apple has over bloated the OS with Ventura. I don't use Stage manger as I find it unneccesary but I am sure others may like it so I don't think it's the issue.

Finally, there is one setting in macOS 13.2 I have not seen before it's a privacy setting for mail where it allows you to hide your i.p. address (supposedly to prevent people from tracking your email actions) I noticed this was turned on by default I am going to try turning this option off to see if that resolves the issue. I will post back if I find the it does or does not resolve my mail.app issue. Again thank you for your reply I appreciate the time you took to respond.

etresoft

Level 9

56,290 points

Jan 26, 2023 6:45 PM in response to MobileMeKevin

MobileMeKevin wrote:

Hi Mark Sealey,

The diagnostics tool that Old Toad had me download is falsely reporting that my MBA-M1 late 2020 has not been restarted in 2 days when actually it was 3 times today before I got his suggestion.

EtreCheck just pulls this information from the system information. It agrees with the dates of your last reported OS install. Perhaps if you have been resetting, reinstalling, and restoring so many times, the system information and the installation information could have stale data. That might also explain why none of those crashes are listed. However, crash reports are not as straightforward and reliable as system information. They are sometimes missing.

You can check the built-in Console app. Those Mail crash reports should be listed there. You could post one or more of those. The process is very similar to posting an EtreCheck report. Normally app crash reports aren't very helpful or meaningful. But what you describe is very unusual. Perhaps some additional data might be helpful in this case.

Feb 4, 2023 6:44 PM in response to Mark Sealey

Hi Mark,

this is what I have done tonight...

I downloaded macOS Ventura 13.2 and created a bootable Ventura 13.2 USB thumb drive. I shut down and started back up under options and erased the Mac SSD and then activated the M1-MBA. After activation I shut down and then booted from the USB thumb drive and did a fresh install of macOS Ventura 13.2.

Next, I launched the mail.app and it appears to be working. Since I did not experience any crashes I turned on the Wifi and added just the iCloud email account to mail.app but I will give it until tomorrow to see if I encounter any crashes. I will wait before I add the additional email accounts (Gmail,Outlook) this has been nothing more than pure exhaustion all due to an issue with mail.app. I will update this message if a crash begins again or if I get through most of the day tomorrow without a crash. - Thank you for your continued help I do appreciate it.

etresoft

Level 9

56,290 points

Feb 6, 2023 8:22 PM in response to MobileMeKevin

Your Mac is trying to display, or see if it needs to display, this “unsubscribe” header: Unsubscribe from mailing lists in Mail on Mac - Apple Support

However, as part of that, it looks at the DKIM message header. One of your email messages has a corrupt header and that is crashing Mail. Considering how often you get this crash, it must be a message that you get pretty often. If you can track down exactly which messages cause this, then you may be able to unsubscribe.

Feb 6, 2023 9:06 PM in response to etresoft

thank you, i suspected a certain email was causing the issue before you requested the crash logs i posted it was from The National Weather service. i have unsubscribed so hopefully that will take care of the issue. thank you very much i appreciate your help.

mputzel

Level 1

14 points

Apr 16, 2023 8:42 AM in response to bscooper547

I believe the upgrade to Ventura 13.3.1 did the trick for me as well. I'm still getting some memory issues that I suspect came with Ventura, but the Apple Mail crashes that were driving me batty seem to have abated.

AlS001

Level 1

8 points

Feb 5, 2023 2:37 PM in response to MobileMeKevin

No. Don’t waste your time. It is definitely a software issue. Unfortunately Apple cannot find the solution yet. I disable my Cox account and mail works fine.

Apr 1, 2023 11:30 AM in response to RayDW

For me, OS 13.3 solved the problem.

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Mail crashing after installing macOS Ventura (clean install)