Mail and Safari hang on quit, plus other symptoms

So, this has been going on since updating my mid-2012 MBP (non-retina) from 10.8.5 to 10.9, including new versions of Mail and Safari. My sole email account in Mail is my iCloud account, using a .me domain. When I first boot up, everything is fine. I open mail, it's gets messages, I can send messages as well, and the app can be quit normally. Same with Safari, works ok, can be quit normally. Then, after a few minutes up system uptime, there are 3 symptoms, and I think they're all related to one underlying problem, maybe having to do with the local iCloud settings/account stuff:

1. Opening Mail doesn't result in a crash, and the activity window immediately shows activity as usual, but none of that activity completes, starting with "opening mailbox". Mail can be operated during this time, menus accessed, but nothing can be sent or received of course. Going to Mail's prefs works ok, until I go to the Accounts tab, then the whole app hangs. Trying to quit Mail fails, resulting in a hang as well, and only force-quitting gets out of the hang.

2. Safari launches ok, and browses ok as well, hangs on quit, same as Mail.

3. Opening System Prefs works ok, and opening all pref panes works ok except for iCloud and Internet Accounts. Attempting to open either of those results in the System Prefs app hanging, requiring a force quit.

Relaunching Mail or Safari or System Prefs will give the same results over and over, until I reboot from scratch and things work normally for a very short period of time again.

Extra details: When Mail or Safari hang on quit, the Activity Monitor doesn't show excessive CPU usage from them. However, when the System Prefs app hangs, the Activity Monitor shows around 99% CPU usage by the Systems Prefs app.

No idea what to do about any of this. Anyone have any ideas? The hardest part of posting here is to come up with a subject line that'll be found by people searching for similar issues!

MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2012), OS X Mavericks (10.9), 8GB RAM + 750GB HD

Posted on Oct 26, 2013 1:44 AM

20 replies

Nov 16, 2013 12:01 PM in response to stormstereo

An update to my earlier post.

I might just have solved my iMac apps freezing up on me. Before I updated to Mavericks, I had a bunch of shared photostreams in Aperture. I decided to stop sharing those and thereby remove them from iCloud. I then turned off all forms of photo streams/sharing in Aperture, in my Preferences/iCloud settings and on all my devices. Basically, I started fresh with everything related to photo streaming. After a reboot of all devices and iMac, I turned the Photo Stream back on, one device at a time and all is good. Have not had one freeze since. *knock on wood*

The "iCloud Photos" process in the Activity Monitor is up and running with no hickups as of yet.

That might have been my problem then. A photo stream gone crazy when updating to Mavericks.

Nov 18, 2013 11:04 PM in response to JonYo

Same problem:

Try deleting the contents of ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.iCloudHelper and then kill the com.apple.iCloudHelper process in the activity monitor.

Jan 11, 2014 9:13 AM in response to bthomp2420

Thanks, that helped for me! My problem was that Safari hung on quit, with all extensions deactivated.

Quick fix, I hope it'll last.

Sep 30, 2014 6:17 AM in response to bthomp2420

bthomp2420:Thanks for that suggestion. I was having the same problem as JonYo, and your suggestion has fixed things for me. It will be interesting to see if this ends up being something I need to do every so often, or if clearing the iCloudHelper cache the one time took care of this issue for good. Anyway, thanks again!

Feb 12, 2016 3:53 PM in response to Eric Ullman

I had the same problem as JonYo and it looks like bthomp2420's solution to clear the icloud helper cache worked. I did while mail was not running, and killed the icloud helper process, as well. I opened mail, which worked, then restrarted and tried it again, and again it worked. The cache got rebuilt when I restarted mail. The process comes right back after you force quit it.

So far so good -- thanks y'all!

Steve

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Mail and Safari hang on quit, plus other symptoms