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How can I get back Mail Auto-Complete email addresses?

After upgrading to Mountain Lion, my Mail no longer works with the auto-complete of email address.

My Contacts.app works fine, it just seems that Mail is no longer able to 'read' from my Contacts.


I use iCloud and everything was great for years. Mail preferences is set to Auto-Complete email address from my Contacts.


Not sure how the problem started, but I launched Mail on a 2nd computer - on the same iCloud.

Shortly after I did that, my 1st Mac no longer auto-completes email. I'm unsure if that is what set off the problem.


Also, I 'did' read Tom Nelson's article which did not work since it's not an 'alias' problem:

http://macs.about.com/od/MacTroubleshootingTips/qt/What-To-Do-When-Mountain-Lion -Mail-Fails-To-Auto-Complete-Email-Addresses.htm


Also, there doesn't appear to be a com.apple.mail.plist preferences file I can even delete in Mountain Lion.

I use Dropbox, but have never it to sync Addresses, Calendar, etc.


Any help greatly appreciated!


-Mark

OS X Mountain Lion, Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285

Posted on Aug 10, 2012 4:31 PM

Reply
40 replies

Aug 10, 2012 4:38 PM in response to MarkNYC1

MarkNYC1 wrote:


After upgrading to Mountain Lion, my Mail no longer works with the auto-complete of email address.

My Contacts.app works fine, it just seems that Mail is no longer able to 'read' from my Contacts.

Mail auto-completes from Previous Recipients on your Window menu. So, if that's not intact it may be the reason.


com.apple.mail.plist is there, but the User Library is hidden. Go to your Finder "Go" menu hold the option key to choose "Library". Then go to your Preferences folder. But before you do that what's stored in that plist is all your account settings, so you will have to completely reset up your accounts and I doubt it will accomplish anything.

Aug 10, 2012 5:06 PM in response to William Lloyd

Tinkering with anything in 'synced prefs' didn't work.

I did notcie that if I deleted the ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Prefs/apple.com.mail.plist

file that did seem to 'wake up" Mail a bit: Here's what happened:


Now if I enter a known address, I just get an endless spinning gear to the right inside my "To:" field.

But I also noticed my Mail.app Address Book window has always been blank though.

That seems to be the big problem.

Even with this endless gear, Activity Monitor shows that it isn't downloading anything from iCloud though.


Thanks,

Mark

Aug 14, 2012 1:35 PM in response to MarkNYC1

I was having the same problem, and I found that by removing the entire com.apple.mail folder from ~/Library/Containers, that fixed the issue (and starting Mail back up - I'd quit it before removing that folder).


I had to reset all my preferences for viewing and so forth, and it lost all open window positions, but no big deals for either of those (all preferences related to accounts and filters/rules and so on remained just fine).


Hope that this helps someone else.

Aug 24, 2012 1:35 AM in response to DrewSchatt

I had the same issue. After reading this solution I started poking around in the Container folder and found that there was a symlink for AddressBook that was messed up which was causing the problem. In ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Application Support I ran:


$ cd ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Application\ Support

$ ls -lh

AddressBook -> ??/???7??ʪ?????VT???;??\G[?:??:??????T?_Ү??

CrashReporter

Mail

SyncServices -> ../../../../../Application Support/SyncServices

iCloud -> ../../../../../Application Support/iCloud


Seeing the aliases for SyncServices and iCloud, I guessed correctly that I just needed to recreate the AddressBook alias to point to the right place. So I just removed the alias for AddressBook, recreated it, restarted Mail, and it worked perfectly. (Note: I did the following to remove the alias, and recreate it. You should confirm what you are removing is an alias. You should also always make sure you have a backup.)


$ cd ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Application\ Support

$ rm AddressBook

$ ln -s ../../../../../Application\ Support/AddressBook AddressBook


Obviously, DrewSchatt's original solution to this works as well, but this way you don't have to delete the whole folder, resetting your preferences and possibly delete something else important (only recreating the alias, not deleting any files or data).

Aug 28, 2012 1:48 PM in response to DrewSchatt

Thanks Drew!


Your solution worked for me as well. Apple support has been AWOL on this. I am content to reposition my windows and reapply layouts to get this working.


Initially this container thing was causing Mail to crash on launch and deleting it brought Mail back but there was no autocomplete, so knock silicon, I have functional mail and autocomplete again.


Cheers!


Ross

Oct 11, 2012 11:45 AM in response to cMuriel

The Library folder is a hidden folder now. Because of that, it doesn't show up in the Finder (by default, there are ways to change that) or in Spotlight.

However, you can still get there quite easily.

In the Finder, go to the menu named "Go". Select the option "Go to Folder" (it also has the keystroke of Command-Shift-G). Paste in the "~/Library/Containers" (without the quotes). That will take you directly to the folder in question, and everything else you should be able to do from inside that window (drag the com.apple.mail folder to the trash, and then restart). That should hopefully fix the problem!

-Drew

How can I get back Mail Auto-Complete email addresses?

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