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There is a problem with your mailboxes!

I keep receiving this message when I attempt to open mail:

"There is a problem with your mailboxes.

Try clicking Quit and opening mail again. If this message reappears, click Quit and Rebuild Index. The next time

you open Mail it will import your messages."

I have tried doing this and it gives me the same message each time and I can not access Mail. I am traveling and do not have any disks with me. I need to restore Mail or find away to fix the problem. I do have a Time Machine backup with me and I am not sure if I can restore the Mail application from a day before it went bad.

Thanks for any help you can give me!

Posted on Apr 18, 2012 11:49 AM

Top-ranking reply

geek girl

Level 2

369 points

Posted on Apr 30, 2012 6:12 AM

I am having the same exact problem and I'm searching on here for a solution. When I click "rebuild" nothing happens and when I try to open mail again, the same thing happens.

What are some good trouble shooting steps for this?

View in context

50 replies

May 1, 2016 1:34 AM in response to W. Harrison Stone

I have been suffering from this problem for several weeks, if not months. I believed it started after upgrading to El Capitan. I tried the usual suggested solutions (e.g. rebuilding the Mailboxes, removing the Envelope* files, etc). However, sooner or later, the crashes would eventually come back.

I now believe that the problem was caused by some corrupted mail/folder of mine on my IMAP account. Unfortunately Mac Mail could not handle this (other email clients have been more robust).

The way that I managed to solve the problem was with some re-organisation of my old email. In particular, I used Thunderbird (since Mac Mail kept crashing on me) to "Archive" all messages of mine (ie. effectively retiring old mail folders in favour of newer folders named Archive/2015, Archive/2014, etc). In the process, I discovered some very large old messages (20 MB each or so) that I got rid of/deleted. I eventually migrated all messages (in the hundreds of thousands) into new "fresh" archive folders (created by Thunderbird) and deleted the old mail folders.

This "cleansing" process apparently took care of whatever the corruption was. I can now use Mac Mail again.

I am posting my solution here in case it is useful for somebody else.

Mgallego

Level 1

4 points

Jul 6, 2016 8:55 AM in response to Glenn Leblanc

Thank you SO much, you so deserve all the beautiful mornings of the world! Just one question: after Mail has been restored, can I trash the Envelope Index Files that I moved to the desktop or is there any reason to keep them?

All the best,

Mercedes

Jul 6, 2016 9:13 AM in response to Mgallego

You can trash them since everything went ok. They were rebuilt when you opened Mail and reindexed the messages.

Mgallego

Level 1

4 points

Jul 6, 2016 9:22 AM in response to Glenn Leblanc

Glenn, I'm most grateful for your help. I was in distress until I found your solution. All the best!

Mercedes

Jul 6, 2016 9:33 AM in response to Mgallego

Glad to see this is still helping people after 4 years.

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There is a problem with your mailboxes!