Q: mail crashes repeatedly in mavericks on 2013 mba

I celebrated too soon.  MAIL VERY UNSTABLE, STILL CRASHES—but not on launch. 

Any help with finding    ~/Library/Mail/V2    folder much aprecciated.   Thanks.

FIXED: (in my case)

The accounts home folder permissions had been set to Read Only for the account owerner (how does the owner get set to Read Only, makes little sense for such a need however it is a computer)

Settting permissions back to Read and Write and applying them down fixed all my problems. Everything now is working as it was before the upgrade to Mavericks.

Apple has hidden the User Library so we don't mess things up in there. Since things are already messed up in there make a backup and give editing the plist file a shot... In Finder, click the 'Go' menu and press the 'option' key on your keyboard to unhide the Library.

Thank You, Craig for the tip on holding down the 'Option' key.  That worked.  

Got to the Accounts.plist, which appears normal— only 3 KB.

I can now launch Mail, but it crashes after 15 or 20 seconds.  All folder permissions set to 'Read & Write'.

My initial enthusiasm about the account de- and reactivation also waned quickly after I realized that I couldn't have all accounts active. Now I just discovered a new solution that seems to do the trick for me:

*Delete Smart Mailboxes (e.g. "Today")

It seems Mail reindexes all the thousands of mails that you have in your folder and mail just breaks down with many bigger accounts.

After deleting smart mailboxes, Mail now works normal. So far...

Tip for those that haven't upgraded to Mavericks yet: delete the smart folders/mailboxes in Mail, and please report here whether you encountered issues or not.

OPen Terminal and enter

defaults delete com.apple.mail ColorQuoterColorList

fixed it, thanks.

I have tried everything, rebuilt the inbox, the accounts plist, and also turning off Documents & Data in iCloud.

Mail now launches, but shuts down [crashes] after 30 seconds or so.

I will now try the suggestion by you, gikku.  Q: Is this the exact phrase to enter in terminal?

defaults delete com.apple.mail ColorQuoterColorList

?

Thanks.

Here's an excerpt of the latest Crash Report:

Crashed Thread:  0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type:  EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)

Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Application Specific Information:

*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '*** -redComponent not valid for the NSColor NSDeviceCMYKColorSpace 0 0.976121 0 0.342647 1; need to first convert colorspace.'

abort() called

terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException

Message was edited by: NazaMan

Yes, copy that line and paste into Terminal, hit enter.

Your crash report looks similar to mine and the post on the first page

"red component NSColor ..."

Thanks, man. Just gave it a go.  Mail seems to be stable now.  Sent myself test emails.  So far so good.

Will pass your tip on to another thread I've been following.  Big Thumbs Up!

It's a bit of an ugly fix. But it's the only solution that worked for me.

Many thanks simlid!

gikku, not for me.  (6 month old iMac) Have seen that on other boards and nope still crashes after every launch.  Deleted all mail in Library and prefs.  THEN it would launch.  Then setup a new email account setting.   Tried both IMAP and POP.  Either way, as soon as it launches it either waits 5-10 seconds then crashes again, OR it will eventually finish launching, but as soon as I click in the window or on any email downloaded, it crashes again.

Nothing in any of the above posts is fixing it for me.  

Have had to temporarily rent a Macbook which still has 10.8 on it.  All of my email imported easily and reads fine.

But no way to get my mail application to even open for 5 seconds without crashing, not even getting the point where I can import my archived mailboxes.

Nor will Thunderbird import my Apple mailboxes (to use a temporary solution until Apple fixes this) because Thunderbird needs those Apple mailboxes to not only be located in the right place in the Library BUT also needs Apple Mail prefs to know about those mailboxes else Thunderbird won't see them....

that didn't work for me, sadly.

even after deleting all my mail (planning on relying on re-importing archives), and setting up Apple Mail from scratch. As soon as a new email account setup, it starts crashing again.

Heres my terminal session:

Stuarts-iMac:~ srakoff$ defaults delete com.apple.mail ColorQuoterColorList

2013-10-26 20:43:56.959 defaults[484:507]

Domain (com.apple.mail) not found.

Defaults have not been changed.

***?

I added a completely new user account, to bypass any possible corruption under my account.  After setting up the account, and it then eventually downloading the messages from my inbox on server, then the same exact thing happen.   It not only takes forever to launch, as soon as I click on any email, the Mail application crashes.