Apple Mail keeps crashing after installing Mountain Lion.

Bethany Jared wrote:

This is exactly what happens for me as well. It's been like this for around 6 months, or whenever Mountain Lion came out. Worked fine the first few days, and has been crashing on start up ever since.

I figured it out on my mb. Deactivate iCloud from Mail, Calendar and all other accounts. Restart Mail. Voila. It stops crashing.

Did this fix your Mail crashing problem?

Mine's been crashing for as long as I've had Mountain Lion. I have hesitated deleting my mail accounts, because it took me hours to set it up so that it worked.

Mine crashes on Mail startup. Strangely, the app actually opens and begins downloading messages, and after it downloads a few messages, it will crash. The error dialog box opens with all the data and asks to send to Apple. It asks whether I was to re-open Mail. I answer yes and it usually restarts without crashing and begins loading messages where it left off when it crashed.

I deactivated iCloud as mentioned above and it is working much better so far. fingers crossed

This worked for me.

I have two accounts. An Exchange Server and a Gmail account. I turned off the Exchange Account, and the program continued to crash. i turned on the exchange account and turned off the gmail account, and the program stopped crashing. that told me the problem was coming from my Gmail account.

i then went to the Gmail account options, and guessed.

"Keep copies of messages for offline viewing:" pulldown tab had been set to "keep offline copies of everything"

i changed it and set that pull down option to "Don't keep copies of any message"

the problem was solved. the crashing stopped.

It is noteworthy that the Exchange server account is still keeping offline copies of all messages and their attachments, with no trouble. it is only the Gmail account that can not keep offline copies of messages.

Seriously, Apple, please care more about your reputation and fix this today. If you get into trouble again, this time you can not bring back Steve to save the company.

I just had my mail start crashing like the others but after trying the renaming of com.apple.mail in the Containers Folder, it stopped. I had to reset some preferences, but that's it.

Thanks for the suggestion!

+1 for PeterVV's answer. I tried every apple trick I've known for a decade and then found that moving/deleting the ~/Library/Containers/<App> worked. This worked for both Mail and iPhoto which were in perma crash after upgrading to Mountain Lion.

Thanks Peter!

In my case it continues to happen but I believe I have found out why. I recently upgraded the hard drive and during setup of the drive I had a brain fart and renamed the drive. The partition can be any name you want but not the drive itself. My renaming has disabled S.M.A.R.T. and is probably causing all sorts of other problems that haven't been noticed yet. But the mail takes a powder every couple days like clockwork.

Your suggestion worked for me. Have no idea why, though. Thanks!

This worked for me. Then I cleared out all of the duplicate accounts that had auto populated. Mail is up and running! Thanx

I'm surprised that everyone who's having this mail crash is associating it with Mountain Lion, because recently my Mail has started crashing and I use ye olde Leopard (10.5.8). So whatever is going on that is affecting all Mail installations can't be from Mountain Lion. I also made a similar observation to someone else here that after one crash it seemed to work after that.

Once I started Mail without thinking, and when I tried to close it, it wouldn't stop. Even the "force quit" wasn't available. And the computer wouldn't shut down because Mail was stuck in the memory.

If I have the nerve to open the program again, I will see if Phillips idea of changing that setting concerning saving Gmail copies works or not. I am assuming you set it to work as an iMap account.

Hi,

I upgraded from Snow Leopard to ML and after that I tried to start Mail. It opened (= visible in the menubar) but when I tried to open a window (with option-cmd N) it crashed repeatedly. After reading a number of post I tried several things. I finally got it running again. This is what did the trick for me:

- I deleted the 3 Envelope Index files that are in folder ~User/Library/Mail/Maildata.

- I moved all 3 folders that contain my 3 mailaccounts to the desktop. These folders normally are in folder ~User/Library/Mail.

- I moved folder Containers to my desktop. This folder rests normally in ~User/Library.

After this I started Mail up and it asked me to configure my mailaccount. I did this and thus got my main window - for the first time. There were directly a number of mailboxes: those that were stored in ~User/Library/Mail/Mailboxes (these were my smart mailboxes and archives) and also the mailboxes for the accounts (sent, received, drafts). The account-boxes were however without any content.

But from there I could manually import all my sent and received mails and drafts from the three mailboxes and drag them in the appropiate folders.

I hope this is of any help to anyone dealing with the same problems.

Well, my long bout with startup crashing Mail is over. I upgraded to Mavericks (finally) and Mail opens fine now. I just looked at the date of the first post in this thread, and I've been re-starting Mail for a year and a half. It's finally over.