Mail stops responding to mouse clicks in Lion

Yes, that was my Idea too. Goto ... System Preferences -> Users & Groups -> Login Items ... here you can uncheck the hide box for Mail or any app you experience the problem.

It solves also another problem for me. Other apps which won't start in Fullscreen after boot will open in Fullscreen when I uncheck the hide box for the app.

It works for me 🙂

Just a heads-up that this issue appears to be resolved in 10.7.3. I haven't checked Spotify, which exhibited the same behavior, but Mail now appears to be fixed.

Glad 10.7.3 fixed this for you because it's still broken for me. Exact same behavior as always. If you run Mail in full screen mode and set it to start as a login item, after a reboot/restart Mail is completely dead and will not accept mouse input.

Rickyfc,

Sorry to hear that you're still having the same problem. There was something I read yesterday (unfortunately I didn't clip the URL) that there were some problems with the first 10.7.3 update and that the combo update fixes the problem. I'm not sure that your problem and this one are even related, but it might be worth a shot for you to redownload the update and reapply it.

Also, for what it's worth (and I conceed it might be worth nothing!), I try and launch as few items as possible automatically. I use an app called Alfred to create groups of apps that I then lauch with a couple keystrokes, after the system has settled down. The base product of Alfred is free in the App store, and the power pack is about $29. You'd only need the base program to play with it and test it. I think it's one of the best utilities out there. Anyway, stopping the lauch of Mail at logon might also help with the problem.

For the record, I have nothing to do with the software vendor. I'm just an enthusiastic user of it.

My 2¢. Hope it helps!

Alfred looks interesting. I think I'll give a try. Yes, not having Mail launch at startup or turning off the "hide" option does indeed stop the issue from occurring for me (others seem to have the problem without the app even launching at startup but that's not the case for me) and that's always been true but my hope was that, after 6 months, Apple would have figured out the problem and corrected it or at least provided some guidance. They've done neither as far as I know.

One problem with this discussion is that people are talking about at least two different phenomena: there are those who have a problem with Mail launch at startup (but why are they doing this given that Lion will automatically relaunch already-open apps?), and there are those who noticed a problem where clicks would be ignored while Mail was running. It is the latter problem that seems improved in 10.7.3.

Same problem here with Mail, Skype, and others. If I quit the app and relaunch, it works again.

As this happens only on one of my Mac and I have more or less the same confifguration on both machine, I investigated the differences... and I suspect a culprit: TotalFinder. If I activate the Visor (a feature to show a Finder window on top of other apps) and escape, Mail (and others) responds again to clicks !

How many of you are also using TotalFinder and have this problem ?

Bad news folks. I started having this problem in Lion, and it was tolerable, but it has gotten worse since upgrading to Mountain Lion. Now the keyboard and mouse will go completely unresponsive. I am able to switch to another application, but cannot even quit mail! I have to to go Activity Monitor and to a Force Quit. I had thought it might be related to Spellcatcher, so I disabled it but to no avail. If I figure out a fix I will post.

I have the same issue too. Mac email on Mountain Lion does not respond to input at all.

Appreciate if you get clues otr solutions.

Thanks

Ashok

Another "me too"...

I have tried disabling bluetooth, trackpad vs magic mouse, all to no avail. Upgrading to Mountain Lion if anything made it worse!

Classic view does not seem to help.

One thing is for sure, it is something to do with Mail not "seeing" or receiving MouseUp events.

Clicking on the CONTENT of a Mail window when it is behind another apps window (e.g. right now with a Safari window partially covering a mail window does nothing. Interestingly scrolling does correctly scroll the mail window contents. Clicking on the Header or Title bar DOES bring the Mail Message Viewer forward. Sometimes the second click will bring the Mail window forward, but not always it seems.

Clicking on a message title SOMETIMES works, sometimes doesn't but if the mouse is then moved (say to the title bar) to click to see if that "wakes up" mail, mail acts as if I had dragged, and gives the little icon for dragging and moves it in a path following the mouse trail, but only after I click the title bar...

Sounds like the event handler is playing up...

Only started happening in Lion, and Mountain Lion has not fixed it. Only happens in Mail... c'mon Apple - time to have a look at this one!

Well I fixed it, at least in my particular instance. I recall a previous discussion where the problem was with a preference file and deleting the right one was the fix. Oddly, this behaviour also seems to cause Dashboard widgets to not respond to mouse clicks any more.

I went to ~/Library/Preferences and started deleting prefs files to see if anything worked. Remember you have to hold down the Option key to get to Library under 10.7 and 10.8. I viewed them as a list, and dragged everything that was alphabetically before com.apple.* to a folder on the desktop and restarted the computer, and everything is nice again. I got lucky, and you may have to go through more prefs file to find the corrupted one, but this fixed it, and Dashboard is also usable again, whereas it hadn't been since Snow Leopard.

Hey, me too it seems...

I went to my preferences folder and found LOTS of rubbish in there related to the dark history of my machine (Snow Leopard upgraded to Lion upgraded to Mountain Lion).

I deleted all the rubbish, and mail related preferences and it seems to have fixed the problem - fingers crossed!

Hi,

I thought it useful to mention that I had exactly the same symptoms (Mail only). For me the problem was resolved the following way:

I had turned on handwriting recognition from an old wacom bamboo tablet which I hadn't used in a long time (and not updated the driver). It turned out that when my mouse moved over the mail window where the emails are, it tried to use handwriting recognition but that was denied by the new sandboxing. Therefore clicking on the mail window to bring it to the foreground did not work while clicking on the window frame did.

So if you have a pen tablet I recommend disabling handwriting recognition.

I can confirm that chris_hb solved also my problem with mail. I got to System Pref -> Ink and disabled handwriting recognition (note that I had no tablet attached).

Hi,

I also had these problems with mail. They first appeared after I updated to Mountain Lion from Lion and previously Snow Leopard. I also I have a Wacom tablet (Sapphire) which probably has the same driver as the bamboo. After switching off handwriting recognition I used Onyx to clean out all the user cache components. This fixed the hanging problem and also appears to have speeded up mail.