mail crashes repeatedly in mavericks on 2013 mba

no, was an existing email account. And I thought about what you said about a corrupt email, but there are 3 existing IMAP accounts, all work perfectly fine with two other MacBooks with 10.8 still on them. Seriously doubtful all 3 different email accounts tried would have a corrupt email inluded in each AND the other Macs still communicating via IMAP with those accounts fine.

And also, wiping Mail, folders and prefs and resetting it from scratch takes it very long time to open and maxes out the CPU (on a very recent iMac) and still crashes.

It sounds to me like your OS has issues and frankly at this point (as a system admin of 200 Macs) I would backup only the relevent files (leaving behind the prefernece files etc.) and nuke and pave the OS. Make sure your OS partition has at least 100 GB for disk i/o and swapping needs.

I always split my drive into 2 partitions and keep what I call Working Files (also used for FCP X, Adobe CS 6 scratch disks that must be kept seperately to avoid OS performance bottlenecks.) I also keep all my files here instead of the desktop or documents folder.

Good Luck.

This worked for me! Thanks

My mail isn't ‘crashing', but as soon as I click on a 'link' to show more quoted text in an email, the reading screen freezes. Nothing unfolds. I can still select another message from the list above, but the bottom part keeps on displaying the previous message. Only the reading window blocks, the rest still works, I can select other mailboxes etc. but I can't open any other message, until I minimize the window, or close it, and reopen it. So not even closing the application, just the window...

I suppose the colorquotercolorlist should do the trick, but I also get the Domain (com.apple.mail) not found error...

Any suggestions?

I have 2 folders in my trash. I can search either with no problem however when I search the combined trash folder Mail crashes.

I have deleted all trash messages and the problem still exists.

For me the only working "solution" is to deactivate all mal accounts in system preferences and then restart. Start Mail, should work (and looks very clean).

The activate some accounts, Mail should still work. :-)

Next time, same procedure ...

simlid,

You are a god among men! Thank you! For me, the first issue was isolating which e-mail account was causing the problems, which I was able to do by closing Mai, then going to SYSTEM PREFERENCES>INTERNET ACCOUNTS.

From there, I took the logical approach of disabling all of my mail accounts, and opening Mail. From there, I would enable one e-mail account, shut down Mail, enable another email account in INTERNET ACCOUNTS, the re-open Mail. I repeated this until I finallygot to the account causing the problems. From there, I followed your instructions of going to:

~/LIBRARY>MAIL>V2

but then, once there, rather than deleting everything in the folder, I deleted only the folders associated with the offending email account. I also had to delete the account from INTERNET ACCOUNTS

From there, I re-opened Mail, and re-added the deleted account. So far, so good.

Then I closed Mail, followed by the oment of truth... re-opening Mail...

HUZZAH!

It's up and running as if there were never an issue!

Thank you, simlid!!!

Thanks Mac_Addict_IKS. The terminal command didn't work. Had to remove/recreate each account. Now works fine.

After going through the checklist of potential fixes on this thread for Mail crashing in Mavericks, I waived the white flag and decided to download Thunderbird. Nothing seemed to work for me. Pretty annoying.

I can't even get the terminal to come up to try the command, it's one of the many applications that no longer work for me under Mavericks. So far nothing working. Hoping Apple will send a software fix out for this. Last time I upgrade software so soon after its introduction.

It looks like we've got lots of root causes munged into this thread (and I've certainly had no problems with Terminal) but I was seeing similar symtoms; extreme slowness of: startup, message list rendering, message rendering, mailbox switching.

Console pointed out that I had a partially downloaded message:

(Warning) Import: import uti:com.apple.mail.emlx plugin:/Library/Spotlight/Mail.mdimporter uuid:142C071E-A837-11D8-A224-0003930A8D8C 1816 exceeded cpu use limits (12) after 15998 milliseconds sizing:0 - find suspect file using: sudo mdutil -t 1161127

I moved that file out, since when Mail has been much snappier. There are reports of more to fix. I still have problems with:

No separator between the header and body in message <_MCMemoryMessage: 0x7ffea35666c0>

and:

(Normal) Import: Using too many resources after 1344 files (wired: 0 resident: 18956 swapped: 0 regions: 2072), hit usage threshold importing...

and:

-[ICBSyncOperation mergeLocalChanges:]: Account not found during local discovery, however was not found in list of deleted accounts, will not delete

but Mail is usable now.

Thank you so much barthrh.1! I was getting crazy with Mail, then I did ur procedure deleting everything (obviously I had a backup 😉 ) and I created from zero a new account. Now it works!!!!!!!! GREAT!!!! Many thx form Italy!

Paolo

Got it!!

For me it was an incompatibility issue with older iWork documents (Pages & Numbers): Remove them from iCloud folder, or open/save them in the new iWork apps (on Mac or iPhone/iPad)

You can also check them in the iCloud folder on your Mac, and see which of them didn't sync... (they do have an greyed-out iCloud-sync-progression-bar.

After that, iCloud sync is flying again, and so is my iCloud mail account :-))

Niels

BTW iCloud folder is the same as:

~/Library/Mobile Documents/

Mail started repeatedly crashing immediately on my Mac starting it today - about a week after installing OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

Typing in Terminal "defaults delete com.apple.mail ColorQuoterColorList" did not work.

I figured out how to get mail running again with the following:

I think there are several issues that conspired to cause the crashes:

1. Mail changed how it handles GMail accounts causing all of the mail from GMail to be downloaded and duplicated into separate folders depending on the label assigned to the email. In GMail, each email can have several labels. But in Mail, these labels are NOW treated as separate folders - which is how traditional email programs handle this problem. Thus Mail places a duplicate of each email into a folder corresponding to each label.

-> This change forces Mail to repeatedly and heavily re-index the email.

2. Mail has to re-index the thousands of emails in some user's Macs. On my computer, I did not realize that I had over 140,000 pieces of email I had saved through the years. Many people have more. This is over 25% of all the files in the Mac!

-> Unfortunately, doing this re-indexing on the fly while people are reorganizing and manipulating their email can lead to corruption of the contents of the MacintoshHD:Users:YourName:Library:Mail:V2 folder where each email account's data is stored.

-> Interestingly, Mail has to do a lot of the Operating System's work - indexing, reorganizing, labeling files, etc. With some people having over 400,000 emails, this is a lot of work. And it is prone to failure since the Mac OS uses the HFS+ file system which isn't the most robust file system.

3. While Mail is re-indexing and re-organizing the email, OS X 10.9 is also updating the Spotlight index on the fly.

-> These competing file requests can cause the file system to be overloaded, possibly leading to Mail crashing.

The steps to get mail running again are the following:

0. Make a backup of your Mail folder: MacintoshHD:Users:YourName:Library:Mail

1. Open the System Preferences > Internet Accounts Preference Panel. And INACTIVATE every email account by un-checking "Mail" or "Enable This Account" for each email account.

-> This stops the heavy and repeated re-indexing of email. This allows Mail to restart without crashing.

2. Go to each GMail Account you have. Go to Settings > Labels and set "All Mail" to "show".

-> This stops the duplication of emails by Mail. This reduces Mail's re-indexing and reorganization work.

3. If you do not need the emails stored in GMail, erase all of them in Gmail. Go to each of your online email accounts and erase what you don't need.

-> This reduces the indexing that Mail has to do with GMail and other EMail accounts.

4. Go to MacintoshHD:Users:YourName:Library:Mail:V2 and erase the contents of each GMail account's folder and any other account's folder you want to start fresh.

6. Open the System Preferences > Internet Accounts Preference Panel. Then ONE-BY-ONE Activate each email account. Check that Mail can start and remain stable after activating each account.

7. If any account causes Mail to crash, inactivate it. Erase its MacintoshHD:Users:YourName:Library:Mail:V2 account folder countent. Then try to reactivate it.

-> AVOID moving or deleting large numbers of emails during this process. Mail is indexing and organizing the emails so you don't want it to make and error which leads to a crash.

-> You can tell Mail or the File System is working heavily to index the email by using a utility such as iStat Menus which can monitor the CPU usage. Of course, the fan spinning loudly is a clue.

8. Once the indexing is complete, Mail is once again stable.

In the near future, I want to reduce the workload of Mail by archiving the email into DEVONThink Pro Office or Email Archiver or similar program. There, the email can still be organized, searched for, etc. But it will no longer be a burden on Mail to organize. Any email to archive will simply be transferred.

Another lesson learned is that I wouldn't want 300,000+ emails stored in Gmail like some people. Mail will download all of these, taking up a lot of disk space and work to index and organize. Since privacy is a problem with Google, it makes far more sense to offload the email into your Mac, where it can be kept private, and easily searched offline.