Mail stops responding to mouse clicks in Lion

For past couple of days I've used the old "classic" interface and have not had a click problem. Thus, I can only surmise that it is an issue with the new layout. What I don't understand is why so many others don't have this issue.

I've not tried it with a wired mouse. Maybe it only happens with the Bluetooth Mighty Mouse?

Anyone?

Yes, I've had the same experiece with the problem disappearing in Classic view. I thought this might be related to my use of a plug-in called WideMail in Snow Leopard. My reason was that the Subject column had disappeared in Classic view and I needed to go into the Property Manager to manually restore it.

I then tried switching back to the new Lion view, hoping the problem was gone, but it's still there.

For the record, I know for a fact that this has been reported to Apple's engineering staff and that they're looking into it. I don't have any insight on the status, but they are aware of the problem, so the more people who are having it and contribute to this string will help insure it bubbles to the top of the Lion issue list.

I don't think anyone at Apple reads these boards. Where does one go to report a bug or track one? I rather like the new interface and hope they will fix it.

I'm part of the Developer community and had an opportunity to test several builds of Lion early on. This was an issue even then. I submitted it to Apple, along with a screen capture, showing the behavior. The development group then has to priortize issues as they're submitted based on importance to the OS functionality and the number of people experiencing it. I'd rate this issue as annoying, but not a show-stopper. I'm sure they'll figure it out and eventually resolve it.

Apple does monitor the discussion boards. If they start seeing a long string regarding a single issue, it gets their attention and the issue gets escalated, hence my comment about people needing to report that they're experiencing the problem.

If you believe you've got a bug, and you're not a part of the developer community, go to http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html to submit the problem. You can also call Support and let them know the issue, although the link is probably the preferred way of communicating an issue like an OS bug.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for the info. I signed up to be a developer but have not paid the $99 yet. Not sure what my status. I did it to have access to iPad programming library materials. I don't think I'm a "real" developer yet in Apple's eyes.

I'll go to the feedback link you provided and add my two cents to it.

Given all the little annoying bugs in Lion I sometimes think that Lion is "Vista for the Mac." 😁

Thanks again.

Add me to the list. Today, my MBP (July 2011) with Lion started not accepting clicks at all. Every app. Even Finder. I have rebooted twice. And I can't get in to the machine at all because the network was set to a protocol I don't have access to here. So I can't even ssh into it!

I have to say that I have had more trouble with Lion in the past 4 months than I had in the previous 10 years of OS X implementations. I have 12 Macs in my lab and there is no way I'm upgrading them to this buggy implementation. Also, there are some really terrible interface choices that can't be turned off.

10.6.8 is, IMHO, far superior to 10.7. Better interface, better design, more stable, faster workflow. Sorry, guys, but 10.7 is a lemon.

Just to voice that I am experiencing the same problem. I have send feedback.

I had a further look and found that when iCal is set to open at login, but hidden, it becomes unresponsive. I've now set iCal to open at login but not hidden. It is working now, although unhidden the fullscreen iCal slides in & out of focus (from & back to desktop 1).

I am going to add my 2 cents to the growing, and already appreciably sized, chorus here.

My purpose in doing so is to add to the footprint of this thread, so that Apple cannot ignore it.

As far as troubleshooting the problem, I'm busy at what I do, I paid for a product, it's not working properly, and it's not my job to debug. It's Apple's.

I, too, have problems with occasional Mail unresponsiveness. No, it's not a show stopper - I can keep at it until it works. But, it happens every day and is annoying as **** when one moves as much email as I do.

Specifically, i will lose the ability to highlight, or move, emails from one mailbox to another, whether I attempt by touching my trackpad, or fully depressing it (therefore, I don't think it's a hardware issue with trackpad touch sensitivity).

Oh...I'm using an early 2009 17" MBP unibody model, latest Lion (10.7.2), and not a lot of add on software at bootup - pretty much just stock stuff. I've noticed this with earlier versions of Lion also, so I don't think it's distinct to 10.7.2.

That's as far as that goes, but I wanted to add on to a comment made by a previous user, that Lion may be Apple's Vista. I agree that if they're not careful, that may become the case.

1) This new feature to sync all of one's audio content (up to a huge number of songs - can't recall the limit off the top of my head) between all their devices over the iCloud service is going to be a disaster. Bandwidth really doesn't support that kind of movement yet. They had an impossible time making Mobile Me work, and iCloud, although it now seems to work for email, calendar, contacts, had a rough few days at the beginning while Apple's servers struggled to keep up. Now they want to move gigabytes of audio, from thousands of customers, using bandwidth afforded by current tech. This will be interesting to watch....

2) Photo Stream - totally impractical. User has no control. Can't edit the photo album. What one of your devices takes is what you get on all devices. Completely useless as a photo sharing solution - you can't share your creations with friends and family, which is one of the (valuable) concepts Apple has capitalized on over recent years. It's not useful, and it doesn't work for a lot of us. I've turned mine off. And since they're doing away with Mobile Me and it's photo sharing solution, I've had to go outside of Apple to find a replacement.

3) Wireless iPhone syncing. Slow, slow. And now I see sync errors on a regular basis that were never there before, with spare little information provided, except for "x files couldn't be sync'd", or something to that effect. That very much reminds me of my experiences using Windows' mobile OS syncing software a decade ago.

So....Steve Jobs' culture of keep it simple, keep it elegant, and "it just works" seems like it's taking a beating.

Given that Apple devices were the only real hope for elegant machines that always worked, I'm a little concerned about the future of consumer electronics now that he's gone.

Yes, Lion is far more buggy than previous Mac OSes, even at 10.7.2. The missing mail mouse clicks are truly annoying, but I'm afraid it's far down the list of bugs that need fixing, since there's no crash or data loss. I'd really like Time Machine to work again with my USB external HD first (not that the same person would fix these two things).

I'm not sure if this is related, but I'm on Leopard and Mail wouldn't even open - it kept hanging on launch with a "not responding" error in the Force Quit window.

I simply deleted the User > Library > Mail > INBOX.imapmbox folder and now I'm back in the saddle.

- Phil.

Yes! Thank you, Vossron! I knew I was forgetting something!

Time Machine....what a disaster this is becoming. Four times since upgrading to Lion my NAS-based Time Machine share has become "corrupted" and had to be rebuilt from scratch. That takes a long time, each time, even when I hard wire it to my router.

For those of you not already familiar with this particular message of doom....

Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you.

This never happened to me with Snow Leopard or Leopard.

And my deal is a NAS - if I understand you, Vossron, it's not even hacking it in your case with a USB wired drive?

It just works doesn't work.

To steer this thread back towards the original subject a little bit (whether the grumbling about Lion is justified or not), I am experiencing the same problem.

I have a 2007 Santa Rosa Macbook Pro, nothing special about the touchpad - I doubt it's a mouse driver issue, I think it's more likely it's something to do with the new-for-Lion common control libraries that Mail is written with.

I have Mail set to open on login, it is set to open hidden, and it's left in full screen mode. On my last boot, Mail immediately failed to respond to clicks - no waiting period needed. On other boots, it has taken time before it's screwed up on me.

If I drop out of full screen mode, the mouse still doesn't do anything in the program except highlight stuff (no click response). If I then hide and unhide Mail, it starts working.

I have unchecked the 'hide' box on my "Login Items" for Mail and I will report back if I still experience the problem or if this has fixed it. It seems like a reasonable explanation - the program thinks it is "hidden" but full screen forces it to be visible, so the state of the program's visual elements gets "confused" and doing hide/unhide resets things.

FWIW I also have Lion set to remember which programs were open on shutdown ("reopen windows when logging back in").

What I'm experiencing is that sometimes clicks are lost, i.e. I'll click on a message in the list of messages for a mailbox and nothing will happen; I have to click again.

Yes. That is what is happening to me as well. I'm hoping that Apple will fix it in the next Lion upgrade. I'm not all that confident that it will happen!