mail stuck in outbox, general mail problems

this worked perfectly for me! thank you so much Matt!

I did what Matt Bianco said and it worked!!

Good thing too because Lion ROCKS!!

I also set up the new account by hitting new account in the setting tab, and instead of just hitting the "Create" button I held down option so it turned to "Continue". I would imagine you could fix many issues doing that. Such as not requiring a secure password to send mail. Also my outgoing mail password was missing there. That could have been the root of the issue.

Although when I tried to send a test message from my @me.com account it asked me which server it wanted to send from. Hopefully it remembers that!!

Good luck!

Thanks Matt! Worked like dream. And so simple to do. Maybe even solved some other nagging problems with Mail, eg refusing to believe I have a real account...

How to make Outbox remain visible in Mac Mail (10.7.5)

1. Send a large file or photo to yourself or a friend.

2. While it is sending, click on the X at the end of the Activity Line to cancel the send.

The email will be placed in the outbox AND the outbox will be visible.

3. Drag the outbox to the Favourites line up top of the screen (if Favourites line not there make it visible using View tab)

4. Click on the Outbox folder & delete the email you tried to send, & all the other emails stuck in there.

If the actvity bar dissapears before you get a chance to cancel the send, just choose a larger file attachment, until it takes enough time to upload, giving you a chance to cancel the send before it gets sent.

That's brilliant - many thanks.

The prob i was having was that mail wasnt going out, but no outbox was showing, presumably because of a bug in mac mail.. I could search all folders for mail from me and could see them all there in the outbox folder, but couldnt view the outbox folder itself to see which was the offending mail.

Note to Apple: hiding the outbox is fine in a perfect world, but in the real world software inevitably has minor bugs, and users have to be able to see what's happening be able to work around the bugs.

I know this thread is from a couple years ago but I found it when searching for a resolution to my problem & thought I'd pass along what I found out. I just had the same problem except I had a message stuck in my Inbox and since I have my mail forwarded from a school email server and the message had since been deleted on the server I was having issues deleting the message from within the Mail application on my MacBook. I didn't want to completely delete my mail account and add it again so I went searching and found something called "Rebuild" under the "Mailbox" tab at the top of the screen in Mail. I clicked "Rebuild" and the messages in my Inbox disappeared and then reappeared and the message that had since been stuck, & I would get errors when trying to delete, was gone. This seemed to solve my issue & I thought I'd pass the advice along. Hope this helps someone in the future!

Here is the resolution: I switched to Gmail. Much more advance and you can find your emails without waiting. With Apple Mail it gets stuck foreever when you search for a specific email. Gmail has much MORE advance features.

Go Menu

Go To Folder

Type in ~/Library/mail/v2/ name of the email address /.OfflineCache

Clear this folder - solved

The text edit thing only works in 10.5 and 10.6

Jennyalone's advice above worked for me. You can get to the Library via Finder (WITHOUT Textedit) by left clicking Go and then pressing alt/option key. The Library directory then appears in the pulldown. However, given the that .OfflineCache is a hidden file, I used terminal to blow away those files. That definitely cleared the Outbox problem. Will write an alias in my .cshrc to perform this clear with one terminal command. What a pain in the ***. Apple needs to fix this! I would expect this from MS but not Apple!

- Dave

Hello all,

Just adding on from my personal experiences, I was having a similar issue where I would type a reply and send it, but the email would not leave the Outbox and I couldn't get it to actually SEND.

My issue, I discovered, was the fact that I was using a VPN, and I had to disconnect from the VPN in order for Apple Mail to even attempt sending the message. Once I disconnected from my VPN, all was well.

Hope this helps someone.

Cheers,

- jflory7

This is still exists in Mavericks.

This bug exists for AT LEAST 3 YEARS

Update to mail stuck in Mail Outbox Mavericks (simple): Dump the appropriate plists. Here's how:

In Mail, flag all the queued emails in the Outbox, select them all and drag them into the Drafts folder.

Quit Mail.

In the Finder, while holding down the Option key, click on Go and select Library / Mail / V2 / IMAP-accountname@serveraddress

In that folder, open the two folders: Sent Items.mbox and Sent Messages.mbox and delete both Info.plist files.

(You may want to move them to labelled folders on the desktop in the remote chance you may want to restore them.)

Open up Mail and send a test, [whoosh!] then send the drafts you flagged.

Cheers! – Ben

Ok I seem to have found a solution without going over accounts re-setup, at least it worked for me well.

1. Open the Mail app
2. Go to Preferences, then to Accounts
3. Select your account(s) one by one and tick out "Enable this account"
4. Quit the application and then launch it again
5. Go back to Preferences => Accounts
6. Again, select your account(s) and tick "Enable this account"

That's what worked for me, and I hope it does for you as well so you don't have to set up all your accounts over again, which could be a hustle if you have many of them.

I have this same problem, with Yosemite (OS X 10.10.1).

First, Mail has been awful for over a year on this computer -- it's very slow, and always crashing ("not responding").

Now, I can't send any emails, although I can receive emails just fine.

Any "sent" email sits in my Outbox forever. It never sends. I can't delete it from the Outbox (it's permanently stuck there), nor can I move it into the Draft Folder.

I spent an hour on the phone with Comcast, thinking I had a blocked Port, and we went through a lot of solutions which did not solve the problem.

Comcast told me to contact Apple but my Apple Care Plan expired months ago.

This is what I tried:

Deleting and re-entering the email accounts (comcast.net and gmail.com). This did not work.

I tried Rebuild, which did not work.

I've tried a few of the suggestions here, which did not work.

Three other things are going on too, that might be related:

My Force Quit is buggy. Whenever I try to Force Quit an application, the name of the application remains in the Force Quit window, as if I never told it to force quit.

Many of the Apps (iCal, iMail) on my computer have been really slow.

Our Wi-Fi wireless router signal keeps disconnecting.

Could all this be related to the buggy iMail?

Please help! Thank you!

I am having a very similar problem. It is also eating up all of my memory. My iMac us practically useless now.