Mail.app crashes on launch consistently

Even in 2017, this solution worked for me (for the time being at least), when others didn't. Never underestimate the value of a Level 1 responder who, not as well-versed in what should work, spends the time to help find what does work!

5hrp wrote:

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

Thank you, that's the first suggestion that helped solve it for me. I forgot you could disable email accounts by going to 'System Preferences > Internet Accounts'. Mail opened fine with all the accounts disabled, then turning them back on one at a time revealed the culprit—an Exchange account I didn't need anymore. (Removing folders from 'Containers' was unnecessary for me.)

Help!

it started with mail crashing El Capitan, to the point of hard reboot 100 times. Then it went to the OS being extremely sluggish at startup, becoming unresponsive even without opening mail. What to do?

This worked when nothing else did - turning of all accounts' Mail and then running Mail, quitting, turn on ONE account, running mail, etc, allowed me to identify iCloud as the account with the problem. Leaving it off for now until I have time to access it via web and delete everything in the InBox (probably spam from Apple about iPhone X).

I know this is an old post, but I had this problem today.

Mail crashes on launch.

After searching for solutions and some are rather complicated or didn't work for me, I found 'a' solution.

There is a possibility that a bad or corrupt message got in the Mail app, thus crashing it every time I start it up.

The solution that worked for me.

If your using Apple iCloud for your emails, go to iCloud.com in Safari and login. Go to Mail and delete some of the most recent emails in the inbox, then delete them again in the Trash folder. Go back to the Mail app and it should start up as normal.

This also applies to Gmail and Office365 (Exchange) email accounts - as I also have these in the Mail accounts - do the same thing as above - login via Safari, delete most recent and delete again in Thrash/Bin/whatnot.

Hope this will help some of you guys out there.

Dave

Try starting up in Safe Mode. Then Restart.http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455

I'm having the same problem as JadedEye. Mail.app worked just fine yesterday, but now I can't get it to launch.

I've tried your suggestion, hpr3, to use Safe Mode. No luck.

Other things I've tried:

1. Using recovery partition, repaired disk - no problems

2. Using recovery partition, repaired permissions - nothing that looked as if it were related.

3. Tried restoring Mail.app through Time Machine

4. Tried restoring entire ~/Library/Mail folder from yesterday

5. Tried deleting Mail Envelope files

6. Tried removing entire ~/Library/Mail and ~/Library/Mail Downloads folders

7. Tried deleting preferences files -- only one I found was com.apple.mail.plist.lockfile

NONE of these things has made any difference. I would re-install Mail.app, if I could find an installer package anywhere.

I've copied the header and footer of the crash report below:

Process: Mail [632]

Path: /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail

Identifier: com.apple.mail

Version: 6.0 (1485)

Build Info: Mail-1485000000000000~3

Code Type: X86-64 (Native)

Parent Process: launchd [245]

User ID: 501

Date/Time: 2012-08-01 19:44:01.482 -0400

OS Version: Mac OS X 10.8 (12A269)

Report Version: 10

Interval Since Last Report: 331251 sec

Crashes Since Last Report: 17

Per-App Interval Since Last Report: 276196 sec

Per-App Crashes Since Last Report: 15

Anonymous UUID: FCE49931-23F4-4817-A753-154DA076FBDB

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

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)

Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000000

VM Regions Near 0:

-->

__TEXT 00000001094da000-0000000109877000 [ 3700K] r-x/rwx SM=COW /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail

TOTAL 394.2M

Model: iMac7,1, BootROM IM71.007A.B03, 2 processors, Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.4 GHz, 4 GB, SMC 1.21f4

Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro, ATI,RadeonHD2600, PCIe, 256 MB

Memory Module: BANK 0/DIMM0, 2 GB, DDR2 SDRAM, 667 MHz, 0x2C00000000000000, 0x3136485446323536363448592D3636374731

Memory Module: BANK 1/DIMM1, 2 GB, DDR2 SDRAM, 667 MHz, 0x2C00000000000000, 0x3136485446323536363448592D3636374731

AirPort: spairport_wireless_card_type_airport_extreme (0x14E4, 0x88), Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.10.131.36.16)

Bluetooth: Version 4.0.9f8 10405, 2 service, 18 devices, 1 incoming serial ports

Network Service: Ethernet, Ethernet, en0

Serial ATA Device: WDC WD30EZRX-00MMMB0, 3 TB

Parallel ATA Device: MATSHITADVD-R UJ-85J

USB Device: USB2.0 Hub, 0x05e3 (Genesys Logic, Inc.), 0x0606, 0xfa400000 / 3

USB Device: USB2.0 Hub, 0x05e3 (Genesys Logic, Inc.), 0x0606, 0xfa410000 / 4

USB Device: MP560 series, 0x04a9 (Canon Inc.), 0x173e, 0xfa413000 / 8

USB Device: C-Media USB Headphone Set, 0x0d8c (C-MEDIA ELECTRONICS INC.), 0x000c, 0xfa412000 / 7

USB Device: USB to ATA/ATAPI Bridge, 0x152d (JMicron Technology Corp.), 0x2352, 0xfa411000 / 6

USB Device: Keyboard Hub, apple_vendor_id, 0x1006, 0xfa200000 / 2

USB Device: Apple Keyboard, apple_vendor_id, 0x0220, 0xfa220000 / 5

USB Device: Built-in iSight, apple_vendor_id, 0x8502, 0xfd400000 / 2

USB Device: Bluetooth USB Host Controller, apple_vendor_id, 0x8206, 0x1a100000 / 2

USB Device: IR Receiver, apple_vendor_id, 0x8242, 0x5d100000 / 2

I having similar issue since upgrading to OS 10.8. My Mail.app launches but within a minute I get the beachball of death and the application freezes and so does the entire machine. After several attempts to kill the app using command + option + escape the force quit dialog finally comes up and I can kill the app and the machine becomes responsive again. I have downloaded Thunderbird for use until this issue is resolved, hopefully with 10.8.1. I am using IMAP so I have access to al my messages.

Could be caused by a rotten mail message

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4066

Already tryed, dosent work

Same problem. Apple support didn't know what to do except they said to reinstall Mountain Lion. Tried that, didn't work. Now I'm going to see if i can do an archive and reinstall. Evenif that does work, it seems that there is a problem that may reoccur at any time.

Curious thing that if I logged in as a different user, it did come up to a screen asking me to establish an account, so there has to be some incompatibility with whatever is in my user folder.

I already did a clean reinstall and still dosent work, but the webcam got fixed, it was wasnt working before

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.

It is not working either, still mail and "mail, contact & calendar" under system preferences are closing unexpectedly.

It is something about the Library folder, but not sure what

I got it !!

You guys need to delete the folowing files from the Library folder

- com.apple.AddressBook

- AddressBook-v22.abcddb

- com.apple.preferencepanes.cache

Good luck !