Apple Mail keeps crashing after installing Mountain Lion.

I switched to a wire keyboard and did that, also checked for incompatible apps. Mail still does not work.

I suppose it's good that I am not alone. I had posted this problem elsewhere in the forums but as I got no vaguely useful replies, I assumed (wrongly) that this is a unique issue.

I have four other machines running Mountain Lion and they all still work in Mail but my primary machine a Mac Pro, crashes mail shortly after launch. The part of the dump that matters is

VM Regions Near 0:

-->

__TEXT 000000010d378000-000000010d715000 [ 3700K] r-x/rwx SM=COW /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail

Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

0 libsystem_c.dylib 0x00007fff89dbb690 strlen + 16

It's crashing consistently on thread zero. Others mentioned an addressbook conflict, I wiped that one out a few days ago and cannot get any farther than I am now.

I have tried (more than once) all the suggestions that I have found. Even with wiping out entire directories I am always warned that Mail had a problem and do I want to reopen the windows or do not reopen. I've tried both options numerous times and it never works. I have switched to Postbox now on the Mac Pro and while it works it's not the same as the other machines so impacts my workflow.

I see that others who can still call Apple without onerous charges or complete buttheads on the phone are consistent that Apple "knows that there is a flood of issues" Mail is a fairly important application. Perhaps they could get their thumbs out and fix this.

One could assume that the only difference on the Mac Pro is that since it is a production machine it never was exposed to the developer previews. Those other machines may have been. An assumption of course since one could not talk about such a thing.

I had this problem and was quite frustrated for a while but eventually this suggestion worked for me:

I renamed ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail and started Mail -- no more crashes! It rebuilt everything and now my Mail app is working again!

More details at the end of this this thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4162377?answerId=19188112022#19188112022&ac_cid=op123456#19188112

Same for me on my Macbook Air. Mail crashes several times a day after having installed Mountain Lion.

Is anyone aware of whether Apple is working on a bug fix for that?

Sanjaya,

Thanks a lot dude, your suggestion solved the problem. I had to recreate all the accounts and download mail again from the various servers but at least Mail is working again.

Well done sir and thank you!

Fixed!

With thanks to Sanjaya Kumar, doing the following fixed Mail for me. I did have to recreate all my accounts but that was minimal work compared to what starting brand new would have meant.

I renamed ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail and started Mail -- no more crashes! It rebuilt everything and now my Mail app is working again!

Ross

I'm glad that fix is working for the rest of you. However renaming the (~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail) container was the FIRST thing we tried with Apple Support and it did not resolve our crashing.

I now have 12 office Macs, Mail doesn't work on any of them. Our newest Mac Book Pro wehich we just unboxed yesterday and upgraded to Lion with NO mail accounts crashes when loading the first mail account.

This is a joke. We have completely migrated my entire creative management firm to using gmail for email since we use Google Apps for Business. This is sad because Mail was such a great app for business use.

No looking back now.

Hello Sanjaya,

This fixed it for me too! Thanks for the trick. I didn't have to recreate anything, all my accounts were there, my messages waiting…

Let's propagate this good news now !

I renamed ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail and started Mail -- no more crashes! It rebuilt everything and now my Mail app is working again!

My mail app crashed tonight as well. Like everyone else on this post I recently upgraded to mountain lion. I experienced no issues until this evening. I noticed that my issue came about after I composed a long e-mail to a friend which was auto saving to the drafts folder. Once I hit send, that is when I first notice the app crash. I then tried to reopen mail and it kept crashing as soon as it would launch.

What I did to resolve the issue was to turn off my wi-fi signal up in the menu bar. I then launched the mail app and it stayed open. I then deleted the long e-mail contained in the drafts folder of mail. I then turned on wi-fi and mail no longer crashes.

I am not sure if this will help anyone else but thought it might be worth posting in case someone has the exact same issue.

i tried the solutions noted here. mail.app continued to crash.

reinstalled mountain lion on the new MBP-r - all is well.

cmd-r, walk away, pretty easy.

EVERYONE:

Many have been to Apple Genius bars, called Apple support. If you upgraded from Lion to Moutain Lion (even 10.8.1) there is NO CURRENT FIX for this instant crashing of mail.app upon launch.

That said, If you create a new user account, the mail.app works just fine.

This indicates there are issues within the User Account. The upgrade does not like something within many people's users accounts (some have no issues, others like us are hozed).

SUMMARY: The only solution at this point appears to be to install a Clean Install of OS 10.8.1 via a Genius (the download is only an upgrade). Then, assuming you've remotely backed everything up, manually populate 10.8.1 with all your apps, folders and files.

Oh, and it is possible to import all your mail folders over from your Time Machine backup also. The IMAP inboxes should repopulate from your email providers servers.

That's a laborious workaround, but seems to be the only solution at this point.

Let us hope Apple knows this is an absolute nightmare for thousands of users and will have a fix in 10.8.2...

My machine does NOT have ~/Library/Containers/...

Here is what I have done, and so far - Mail has stabalized and is working again!

I went to ~/Library/Mail/V2/[insert name of account here]

Each of my accounts, three Gmail and one Mac account all conatined three hidden files:

.dat45ab.nnn ( the nnn were different on each account

.mboxCache.plist

.OfflineCache

I shut down Mail and made a "keep" folder and omved all three files in each of the four accounts into the "keep" folder. Re-started Mail and have been stable for over two hours now (earlier today, I lost track of how many times Mail crashed).

I lost no email messages or settings and am happily productive once more.

I have the same problem with Apple Mail crashing since upgrading to Mountain Lion, but a new one is cropping up where it keeps submitting a password to the mail server until the server initiates an automatic block on my IP address so no email at all! Apple really needs to fix this.

I had the same problem and tried all the fixes suggested in these forums. I got so frustrated I phoned apple and we spent 4 hours going through several fixes until one worked. Apparently it is a keychain problem not accepting the passwords. That said it seems many people have slightly different problems with mail. I found that the phone support was excellent and the walked me through several possibilities. I did not have to pay for this fix as it was an apple product that caused the problem so I was happy with that. If you do call apple just make sure you have the time to sit on the phone for awhile (have a drink of your choice ready as it will take awhile).

Hello everyone. I fixed this problem by installing ML from the root. It was quite a prblem but after that no moer problems... until today! When trying to add some smart groups to my Adressbook, after that, Mail started to crash, like some time ago. And no matter what happens it crashed and crashed every time I tried to launch it. So, I went to Adress Book and remove my recently created smart groups and, Apple Mail stopped to crash. That's odd because I have another smart groups on my Adressbook. Any idea about what is going on?