Mail refuses to load after Lion.

thanks it took me over 30 tries, cause I have about 10000 emails I guess. Thanks.

Sadly, the "brute force" method hasn't worked for me.

I have Console open and it seems to be crashing at the same mail message. Fortunately, I have another computer I can work on. I guess I'll keep trying the brute force method for a while.

The combination of "brute force" and ensuring that all software updates were applied did the trick.

Looking at Console showed that it finally made it through the errors.

I fixed this issue by deleting my mail accounts from System Preferences and re-adding them. Once I did that, Mac Mail opened fine and ALL of my folders were in tact for several mailboxes. Even my smart mailboxes were showing fine.

Same issue here. I deleted the Libraries\Mail folder to resolve it. I'm just using Gmail IMAP so wasn't worried about keeping the mail database intact...

No solution so far ... Mail will not even start again.

It worked! Thank you!

After installing Lion, Mail kept crashing every time I opened it. I took the suggestion from jsherald and moved the entire Library/Mail folder to my desktop. Mail opened, but I'm still struggling with it. It let me put in my gmail account, but exchange is buggy. It has something to do with the server name...normally when I'm setting up my mail I would put in exchange.domain.com (can't connect) or weboutlook.domain.com (crashes), but I tried server.domain.com and it actually set up the account. However, it won't actually get the mail....boy this is frustrating.

After removing your Library\Mail folder, try going to System Preferences>Mail, Contacts & Calendars. Remove all the acounts there. Then go back into Mail.app again and start from scratch.

My Mail.app wasn't crashing, it was in an infinite hang where I had to force quit to get out.

I love Apple... but this just seems like a really big "oops"...

Thanks for all your suggestions...

The way it worked finally for me (after a long night working on the mail thing)

I went to the time machine backup and copied the latest mail folder to my desktop.

Then I deleted via system preferences all my mail accounts.

Then deleted in /Users/USERNAME/Library/ the "Mail" folder.

Then deleted in /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences/ the 2 com.apple.mail prefs files.

Started mail again.

New input my 2 email accouts. Downloaded the last emails from accounts. Mail worked.

Then imported all the old emails in the old mail folder on desktop with the mail programm. Worked fine.

Maybe this will help you. To copy the backuped mail folder into the new library did not work in my case.

Happy roaring!

I read your post and thought "what can holding the Control key down while opening Mail possibly do to help?"

I don't know if it was coincidence, luck or fate, but I'd already tried reinstallation 2X, the brute force method many, many times, manually moving folders, etc., etc. with no luck at all--Hours of attempting to fix this problem without success.

I read your post and thought "what the heck," I'll give it a shot.

Opening Mail and as you stated, waiting until after it started to press the control key worked. I continued to press the control key until the migration had completed (approx. 40,000 emails migrated--have to track down remaining 30K +, but happy for the progress).

Many thanks to you, mj! 🙂

this worked for me Go to Applications>Mail>Control click>Show Packagecontents>Contents>MacOS and double click the Mail Unix executable File

This has not worked for me and I still get the message about restoring windows and a mailprogram that needs a force quit. Why haven't they made it a standalone program that can be easily reinstalled??

Wow, I can't believe hold the control key was all I needed to do. Although I had also previously removed my Mail .plist files from ~/Library/Preferences to no avail, so it might have been a combination. For what it's worth, the errors I saw in the Console log when Mail unexpectedly quit during the database upgrade were:

7/24/11 2:20:47.850 PM Mail: *** Assertion failure in -[MFMailMigrator _migrateFromV1ToV2Layout], /SourceCache/Message/Message-1244.3/Library.subproj/MFMailMigrator.m:698

MailAccounts were initialized before migration from V1 to V2!

7/24/11 2:20:47.859 PM Mail: *** Assertion failure in -[LibraryUpgrader run], /SourceCache/Message/Message-1244.3/Library.subproj/LibraryUpgrader.m:554

MailAccounts were initialized before the Library was ready!

I spent two hours wrestling this issue yesterday; for me it was related to my Exchange account. If I removed that from my user accounts, Mail and iCal loaded and ran fine (my other accounts are verizon and google).

Today I got a fix and was able to add my exchange account back, and it's working fine with Mail and iCal. Hope this helps some of you...

It seems that the latest Mac OS X Lion (10.7) shipped with a bug in the certificate checking. While we don't have a software fix from Apple at this point, we do have a way to fix the issue.

Here are the steps:

1.In Finder, open your Utilities folder and double-click Keychain Access

2.Once Keychain Access loads, in the menubar, click "Keychain Access" -> "Preferences"

3.In the Preferences window, click "Certificates"

4.Change the dropdown for "Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP):" to "Off"

5.Change the dropdown for "Certificate Revocation List (CRL):" to "Off"

6.Close the Preferences window

7.Quit Keychain Access

8.And you're done!