Spinning beachball in Mountain Lion Mail - HELP !!

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Level 1

75 points

Spinning beachball in Mountain Lion Mail - HELP !!

Macbook Pro running Mountain Lion

Mail is full screen and has a spinning beachball - I cant minimise the screen - I can swipe to bring up the desktop or anyother program, however whenever I go back to Mail I get the beachball.

So - I have done a 'Force Quit'

When I reopen Mail it defaults immediately to the full screen and then seconds later the spininng beachball starts.

I have done a full restart, Mail starts up the same way with the same problem.

I have held the power button in and done a PRAM reset - I still get it opening up the same way.

I've been to Disk Utility and done the verify and repair disk but the utility finds no problems, therfore nothing to repair. I'm running out of ideas!

Help!

MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2009), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4), 8Gb ram

Posted on Jun 29, 2013 10:41 AM

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Answer 1

arthur

Level 5

5,242 points

Jun 29, 2013 1:24 PM in response to Jessmjc5

Maybe the mail preferences are corrupt. You could try:

Go back to disk utility and repair preferences.
if you have a Time Machine backup, you could reinstall the preferences from a backup when it was working.The way you do this is
1. hold down the option key
2. in the Go menu in the Finder, scroll down to Library
3. in Library, go to Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences and select the folder Preferences.
4. then you go into Time Machine, select the backup, and it will navigate to that Preferences folder, and you tell it to replace the current folder with the backup version. If you have changed any preferences since that backup, you will have to redo your changes if you want them.
If you don't have a time machine backup, you could do the option key-Go menu trick, go to Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences and find and drag the file com.apple.mail.plist to the trash, and then restart. You will have to reenter your preferences.
if that doesn't work, I'd try reinstalling OSX over your previous installation. Perhaps overkill but I bet it would fix the problem.

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Answer 2

Eric Root

Level 10

684,039 points

Jun 29, 2013 1:37 PM in response to Jessmjc5

If arthur's suggestions don't work -

Quit the application.

Hold down the option key while using the Finder “Go To Folder” command. Enter ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.mail

Move the folder to your desktop.

Open the application and test. If it works okay, make sure your mail is there, and then delete the folder from your desktop.

If the application is the same, return the folder to where you got them from, overwriting the newer ones.

If you prefer to make your user library permanently visible, use the Terminal command found below.

http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/04/show-library-directory-in-mac-os-x-lion/

You might want to bookmark the command. I had to use it again after I installed 10.8.4. I have also been informed that if you drag the user library to Finder it will remain visible.

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Answer 3

CaptH

Level 1

59 points

Jul 16, 2013 11:11 AM in response to Jessmjc5

Go to the how to section of the site below:

http://scsc-online.com

and read the article on troubleshooting Mountain Lion performance problems with Activity Monitor. Also you might want to check your log files via the console to see if they're giving you obvious errors.

Hope this helps.

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