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

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.

Mail is sandboxed on Mountain Lion.

All Sandbox applications store all their "stuff" in ~/Library/Containers.

In Mail, the previous recipients list should be in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/SyncedPreferences/com.apple.ma il-com.apple.mail.recents.plist

Select your card in Address Book or Contacts. Then select Card ▹ Make This My Card from the menu bar.

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.

Excellent work Drew!!! Thanks!!! This solved my problem. I contacted Apple Support last Saturday and was awaiting a repsonse after using Capture Data for Apple. I phoned them today and left a message about your fix. Again thank you for providing a fix to a problem that's been frustrating me for weeks.

David

This has been a huge pain, but this fix worked perfect .. I figured that worse case scenario I would just restore the "com.apple.mail" directory via Time Machine if it had'nt worked. Thanks!

-vince

This solved my problem !

Thank you.

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).

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

Right on!!! Thank you!!!

Hi Drew, I am having the same issues discussed here with mail auto-fill. I tried to find the /library/container/... but its nowhere. Is it hidden? I've tried through search, spotlight, etc. I am not very proficient in Mac yet, so your detailed help would be greatly appreciated!!!!!

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