Mail.app crashes on launch consistently

After much stuffing around with other suggestions, this worked for me straight away. Thanks Norman!

It may also be worth noting that I had already removed the mail folder from my library as suggested in earlier posts. I don't know if this had any impact.

Didn't have any impact with me when I moved the folder.

Glad you were able to get it working again.

Cheers

David Mccollum1's fix seems to have worked for me!

David Mccollum1 wrote:

I fixed it! I went to ~/Library/Containers. There I removed the entire com.apple.mail folder to the trash, emptied the trash and rebooted. Mail opened just fine and started populating with all my email. So, I'm back in business. I did make a copy of the file on an external USB thumb drive just in case, but it looks like I won't need that.

Good luck.

l

Perhaps the ideal situation - having just spent a whole day trying to get Mail to behave - is to dump it and use Thunderbird or an email programme of your choice that actually works! Well done Apple!

Brilliant. I didn't even have to trash the folder and restart. Just click Go in the Finder menu, then Folder, then when you get there add an x to the name, so you don't have to have the stress of trashing the thing. Then start Mail and it worked. Thanks David.

AddressBook-v22.abcddb

THAT frickin' file was the culprit of THREE problems on my MacPro that were instantly fixed by deleting it.

I couldn't sync new contacts created on my MacPro to iCloud, I couldn't delete contacts from my MacPro (Delete Card was greyed out), and separately, Mail was crashing on initial launch every time (but was fine after a Reopen).

Deleting that AddressBook-v22.abcddb file fixed EVERY ONE of those issues in Contacts and Mail for me. Everything is humming again quite nicely.

(It's located in users/(your username)/Library/Application Support/Address Book)

Maybe my solution will help somebody (Reopen with shift or simple removing ~/Library/Containers didn't help for me).

– Go to System Preferences, disable all your mail accounts

– Remove ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail folder

– Open Mail.app. It should be ok, since it would be empty

– Close mail.app

– Enable accounts in settings

That's it. Helped me

David Mccollum1 wrote:

I fixed it! I went to ~/Library/Containers. There I removed the entire com.apple.mail folder to the trash, emptied the trash and rebooted. Mail opened just fine and started populating with all my email. So, I'm back in business. I did make a copy of the file on an external USB thumb drive just in case, but it looks like I won't need that.

Good luck.

worked for me too, Thanks!

Holding shift worked for me.

To anyone: do you also notice that bugs are almost never fixed? When you are victim of a bug, is it also often bugs known for years?

Thank you! Did not actually have to do the step of emptying the trash bin. Didn't empty it because of a warning about permanent files in it, so emptied the non-permanent ones. The Apple Mail folder still remained (was not permanently deleted). So I rebooted at that point to see if the my mail would load, and it did! Thanks!

I suppose Apple will provide a patch very shortly, as likely most others with this issue also sent a report to Apple. It was definitely the update to Yosemite 10.10.4 that caused my mail to no longer load (and to give me the beachball of death every time I launched Mail).

Thanks again! 🙂

This worked for me, albeit I just deleted the contents of the com.apple.mail folder, not the entire com.apple.mail folder. I didn't back it up first but Mail came back OK, although I had to reconfigure some settings/preferences.

Super. That helped me. Was able to activate my accounts one by one and find out which on apparently had a corrupted email. Deleted the recent mails I got on that account since "Mail" started crashing. And problem solved. Thanks

Mail was crashing upon opening, and holding the shift key down didn't fix it. I finally figured out there was a problem with a message in the Outbox, and Mail kept trying to send the email each time the app opened.

What worked was turning wi-fi off and disconnecting my Ethernet cable, then opening Mail (with the shift key held down, though I don't know if that was necessary at that point) and deleting the offending message. Then I connected to the Internet again, and all was well.