I upgraded to Lion yesterday and mail was working just fine. I restarted my machine this morning and although the app opens its "not responding" and I get the spinning ball of death!. I cant use it at all. Anyone else had this problem and anyone managed to fix it?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7), OSX Lion
The bad news: Today Apple phone-support in the end advised me to clean my HD completely, install Lion from scratch on an empty disk and then start restoring whatever i want to resore... might work...
The good news (in my case!): After 1,5 minutes playing with the beachball, Mail start working normall again, so i just have to be a bit patient... and keep running Mail after it's initial start...
Maybe i just wait a month or two; maybe one of the next updates on Lion solves the problem... or not...
I have the same issues here too. Even with the 10.7.1 update, mail and address book regularly freeze for 10 - 20 seconds and then I can work with it again. But it'll freeze shortly after again. Very frustrating... 😟
As TUAW reports, OS X 10.7.2 now is available for developers and Apple asked to focus on... Mail (Whoa!) amoungst others.
Same problem here, sometimes hangs for 5-10 minutes and then recovers. 10.7.2 on i5 2.33GHz. Have demoed to a Genius who recommended clean install of Lion but I am sceptical that would sort it, so hanging on for now...
Apple advised to me:
- Backup with Time Machine
- After reboot into new system, create a NEW user and login as such ⚠
- Start Migration Assistant (Programs/Utilities) and opt for migration from Time Machine, but
ONLY the Users and Applications (NOT the Settings and Other files...)
- After Migration Assistant finishes (takes some time), reboot en login as the happy user you once were
- If all OK, you will be that happy user again :-)
- If you want to, you can remove the NEW user you just made (temporarely)
What i understood is:
1. The 'old' users will be restored, including their 'home' with all their files and settings
2. Only the Applications not supplied by the clean Lion-install will be migrated
meaning that you replace the bumpy version of Mail.app by a fresh copy, while all
your settings and all the programs you downloaded somwhere in the past are back
Hope this works for others as well.
Hey Ron - I'd be curious - did it work for you? Please update us. I have had some success speeding things up but took a lot of different steps - may share if the improvement lasts as performance has been variable... Stefan
Indeed, forgot to mention that this solution worked beautifully for me. I don't believe there are shortcuts to the procedure as described, but since i went trough all the steps both my iMac and the Mail.app work as they should. Good luck and succes.
Has anyone had success using pop mail yet?
How I wish I had read this forum before upgrade to Lion. Its been a real nightmare with mail. the same spinning rainbow ball of death. Worse than my old windows which forced me to move to apple 4 years ago in the first place.
I was forced to reformat and start from scratch. Did not even bother to resotore anything from Time Machine. Situation was even worse. Works fine as long as i dont use mail or Time machine backup which is now switched off.
Contacted apple who called me back . Was told system freezing because my mac which is now 5yrs old and has HDD 250GB and RAM 4GB does not meet minimum requirement for Lion which is 600GB HDD and RAM 4GB, though my HDD still has 190GB free space. And that is the reason why it freezes.
I am confused now. Just cant afford a new mac in this economic heat wave. The wife will kill me!
aaaaargh!
Hey,
the HDD free space argument sounds like non-sense to me. I did invest in a 4GB RAM upgrade (was only £30) to get from 4GB to 8GB and installed it myself - not sure if your older Mac can take that much, if it has two slots it might. That certainly made things swifter in general.
The general slowness also seemed to improve once I switched off any Mobile Me accounts in iCal and Mail and streamlined various auto-sorts I had set up etc. I had set up - there just seemd to be loads of syncing going on. I did a re-install of Lion (just over the net) but not sure that did much, I didn't re-create users or anything of the kind.
I am now happy again with the overall performance including Mail (and it does sometimes still need a minute or two to get swift after starting up), so maybe that gives you some hope.
Processor-speed might be the other limiting factor if your Mac's quite old but maybe some of the above helps marginally at least.
Good luck in any case!
Thnx Leo for this reply. It certainly gives me a bit more hope.
The specs are
Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac6,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.33 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: IM61.0093.B07
Memmory
BANK 0/DIMM0:
Size: 2 GB
Type: DDR2 SDRAM
Speed: 667 MHz
Status: OK
BANK 1/DIMM1:
Size: 2 GB
Type: DDR2 SDRAM
Speed: 667 MHz
Status: OK
I dont know if anybody on this forum can advice if its possible to upgrade both RAM and HDD though I virtually dont save anything to the HDD. I use a NAS instead.
That will at least buy me some time till I can afford a new mac.
Thnx
Hey lurdsammie,
you don't have your emails stored on the NAS by any chance? This could explain the lag with the spinning beach ball.
My lag is bascially gone and that might be due to the fact that I'm now on 10.7.2 but more likely on my "fixed" harddrive. I've got a setup in my laptop where my system files and programs are on a SSD and my user files are on a hardrive which resides where the DVD slot drive formerly was. Anyways, I've noticed issues with lags not only for mail but also for a couple other programs. I've tried to fix the drive with apples disk utility and had no luck. Then I've tried Drive Genius and that did the trick for me. Apparently there were a couple errors on my disk that made the system choke. Now, everything works really well again.
Good luck,
Chris
Thnx Chris for the info.
All my applications are installed on the internal drive including mail. I only keep downloads and other files and folders on the NAS due to previous experiences with windows. It was all working perfectly well. For 4 yrs since switching from windows to Mac, I never had a single crash. I was forced to upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion 2 weeks or so ago due to iCloud. Since then **** is broken loose.
I have had slow downs and freezes with other apps on Lion but by far mail seems to be the worst culprit. I have in fact in the past few hours had to exit it completely so that i can do some work.
I also have MacKeeper which is apparently is a top notch for keeping mac in shape. It repairs and clears the junk but problem persists.
Its awful. Its so embarassing to see mac behave this way!
Mail is a real big pain in the neck for years. If you have a choice drop it and go for another program. If you canlt drop it, because you are using other applications that are linked there might be an odd work around. Disconnect from the internet completely. Start your mail application. (It is handy when you click on "view: and than on "Activity window" so you see what is going on.
It may take up to a few minutes for mai to start up if it was snoballing. As soon as your activity window is empty. right click on one of your mailboxes and opt for "erase deleted messages" wait till you see the window in which the question is asked if you are sure to erse the deleted messages. Click on it and connect to the internet.
In most cases mail will come back to live. If you have a great number of account you might be out of luck and repeat the nonsense a few times.
Apple will mostly claim that an imap message is not loading. That is very often indeed the case, but that has very little to do with your mail provider. If you click on an email with a large attachment mail in Lion is simply stalling. Therefore try to switch to an message without an attchemnet. The activity window will show when the downloads have been finished.
Mail is a nice program for when you have no more than a handful of email accounts. In such case you can also go to "library" (Finder + option key, than to mail and than to V2. In the V2 map you click on Maildata and you can remove everything except for the accountsplist and the messageruleplist. Messages stored on your harddrive are gone, but you will regain access again to a working mail application.
FINALLY! Your suggestion to open up the activity window did the trick. I discovered that the Mail program was circularly checking the MobileMe server (which no longer exists). Even though I had switched this computer to iCloud, for some reason, one email address was still a MobileMe account.
I deleted the offending address, and the freezing has stopped, at least for the moment.
Mail hangs following Lion Upgrade
