Dreaded Beach Ball Back in Apple Mail 10.8.2

Rebuild mail database?

Edit/P.S.: We're not all having problems... better no finger-pointing and general accusations... 😉

You do this to possibly get Mail working again, no matter what caused the problems:

In Mail, click on Mailbox in the menu bar, then all the way down there's "Rebuild". Click. Let's see if life's good again.

Once it stops, first go to Preferences and under General, set "Check for new messages" to "Manually" to prevent from more spinning.

Best shut Mail down once, then launch it again and do the rebuilding.

First, is Mail working okay without hanging?

Then, Mail is "empty", no mails there? Your mail accounts are IMAP or POP3? In case of the first the emails should load, both received and sent. In case of the latter there's a workaround to easily get them across, but sent mails could become a problem... but I trust that they're on your HDD still, and then you'll get them all back!

Step by step... how about my Q's here above?

You've done the rebuilding, yes?

Oh, that's what you meant by "manually".

So, do you have all your previous emails in Mail? And, if you "Get All New Mail" (from the menu or with Shift-Command-N), what happens?

If no more beach ball but normal behavior, it should be all good, and you can set "Check for new messages" thingy to some preferred intervall again.

If still beach ball, the rebuilding didn't help, obviously, and it's caused by something else...

First of all, you might like Apple Mail or other mail clients better, but Apple Mail as in 10.8.2 is not bad. It works well for very many if not most users, including myself. Then there are many factors outside of Apple's control that can screw it up. I doubt you know what has screwed up your Mail; if you knew, we wouldn't be here. For as long as this is the case, please don't make assumptions, and sure not statements as such. Thanks.

Back to fixing, I take it rebuilding was not helpful. Well, then you amy want to https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4359973?answerId=19788168022#19788168022. Your problem might be caused by something different - possibly not even by anything related to email at all - but this fix may work for you as well, whatever has corrupted your email (you may want to dig deeper into that then, especially if problems persist or re-occur).https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4359973?answerId=19788168022#19788168022

Note the advice in that post on backup and mailbox import, make sure you get everything back - it's depends on yourself in the first place.

Hello folks. I wanted to try to help with Apple Mail. I may have a resolution. Below I (1) explain the issue; (2) offer background; and (3) describe how I took care of it with help from Apple Support.

Here is the issue. I started to get the spinning beach ball. I would force quite Mail, relaunch, and it took maybe 10 tries and it would run okay for about 5 minutes before freezing again. This happened for a full day.

Here is the background. There are two facts that may or may not be relevant: (a) I was one of the 1.1% who lost Apple mail access for 48 hours back in September 2012; and (b) I just upgraded to the most recent version of Mountain Lion when this problem arose. Additional background. I have a .mac account, a gmail account, and three Exchange accounts associated with my job.

Here is how I took care of it. I tried everything.

Force Quite

Rebooting

Reinstalling Mountain Lion

Deleting Mail preferences

Deleting all preferences

Rebuilding mailboxes (when the program was running for a moment)

Eliminating bundles/add-ons such as Mail Act-On and Spam Sieve

Safe Boot

I also tried a guest account on the same machine. Same problem. But my iOS devices worked fine. And Apple Mail worked fine via the web.

Apple Support walked me through all sorts of options, mostly what I tried above. The support guy -- I was passed to the advanced guy -- was actually complimentary, because I listed everything I did, and he said that was all eh would have recommended.

He did give me the top that led to the solution. I am not sure why. But in System Preferences, under Mail, Contacts, Calendars, I turned off all five accounts. Then I turned them on one by one. It seemed as if the Exchange accounts were the problem. With the .mac account enabled, but not the others, Mail launched and I had the spinning beach ball for about 30 seconds, then it worked fine.

However, after I got it working, and I was thinking I'd call IT at work, I tried again, enabling the other accounts (from inside Mail), and it worked fine.

I'm thinking unchecking all accounts from System Preferences. then re-enabling, did the trick. But everything else probably helped as well.

For what it's worth.