Mail doesn't shut down; need to Force Quit

A friend, whom I just convinced to switch to Mac, is experiencing this same problem - even though she's still using her Yahoo account for mail. On the rare when she does open Mail (primarily to see if that's a switch she'd want to make), it will not Quit, or allow the computer to shut down. The message is something to the effect of "Mail caused a time out...".

A suggested workaround at another posting that worked for her was to use Activity Monitor (Applications>Utilities>Activity Monitor) to Force Quit the Mail application. That, however, doesn't address the cause of the problem. Looking forward to getting some pointers in that direction.

Do you have multiple mail accounts? Are any of them not working correctly or taking longer than normal? If so try recreating them.

I am having the same problem. Every once in a while, I will delete a message and Mail says it couldn't complete it (or something to that effect). Then the Quit menu is grayed out, I can't open a Mail window, and I can't shut down. I have to Force Quit Mail. This only has happened since "upgrading" to Mail 4.4. All I can do is Force Quit. It is happening more frequently as time goes on - maybe a cascade effect?

Jim

I've been having this problem for several months. In fact, I was experiencing it on my G5 tower, under 10.5.6, and I had hoped that replacing the entire computer with a new iMac, and a brand new operating system, would make it go away. No Joy. Apparently the MIgration Assistant helped the problem migrate to my new machine.

But I'm posting this because I think it's significant that the problem exists independently of the operating system or hardware. I think there is some kind of plug-in or extension which can be transferred between machines and software versions.

Specifics: I can't quit mail normally on the desktop which was migrated from my old machine. 'Quit' grays out in the menu, but the program doesn't stop running. I can compose, send, and retrieve email as if nothing is wrong. This problem does not appear when I create a new desktop account and log in on that one. Mail quits normally on that desktop. But on the migrated desktop, I can never quit normally. Force quit will work, though, which is an improvement over 10.5.6, when I had to do a hardware reset.

I have isolated the incidents down to this - when I delete an email, then quit right away, I receive the unable to complete task message and Mail won't quit. Maybe it has something to do with quitting before it can finish processing commands on the server when a message is deleted?

I am having the same problem. I also find that sometimes my outgoing mail hangs up and won't send until I force quit and restart. I tried checking all my outgoing connections with Connection Doctor, but everything seems fine.

I've had to force quit Mail about six times since the 10.6.6 update. Noting similar for ~18 months before that update. Have also had this happen with VLC and MS Excel since the update.

Since the 10.6.7 update, Mac Mail has refused to shut down without using Force Quit. I don't even know where to begin looking for what's causing this, and I dread sinking hours of time into it.

Any ideas?

If all your mail accounts are IMAP accounts, you could try removing the accounts from within Mail's preferences. I'm not going to advise you how to handle POP accounts because I haven't had a POP account for nearly a decade - deleting a POP account you would lose your locally downloaded mail because the only place it lives is on your computer. With IMAP everything will still be safe on the IMAP server. Reboot for good measure. Restart and recreate the mail accounts anew. All your mail will repopulate next mail server login. You may have something corrupted in a local database index or something, and account recreation would fix that.

You may want to consider reapplying the OS 10.6.7 combo update (top hit when I google "10.6.7 combo") after having run disk utility verify disk and disk utility repair permissions, too.