Continuous "Welcome to Mail"

Here is a solution:

1. Start OS X Mail

2. Go to: Preferences ▸ Accounts

3. Turn off all your mail accounts with „Enable this account”

4. Quit Mail

5. Restart Mail

6. Go to: Preferences ▸ Accounts

7. Activate all your mail accounts with „Enable this account”

8. Quit Mail again

9. Restart Mail

"Welcome to Mail" has now disappeared!

Thanks to http://www.appletips.nl/genius/discussion/122/startscherm-welkom-bij-mail-blijft -terugkomen#Item_1

I finally found it! No need to deactivate any accounts.

1. Go to Mail Preferences / Accounts
2. Select the "Advanced" tab of an IMAP (or Exchange) account and make sure the checkbox "Automatically download all attachments" is checked
3. Repeat with all IMAP and Exchange accounts (active or inactive), saving changes when asked to
4. Optional: for those accounts where you want to load attachments only on demand, remove the checkmark again

In-depth explanation:

With Yosemite the available options for caching messages changed. Before there were 3 possible values for the key "CachePolicy" in Accounts.plist: "CacheAllMessages" (or missing value), "CacheNoMessages" and "CacheMessagesAsRead". Now there are only two options: "CacheAllMessages" (or missing value) and "CacheAllBodies" (meaning without attachments).

If there are Accounts with one of the deprecated options "CacheNoMessages" or "CacheMessagesAsRead" configured, the welcome screen will show until the caching option is actively changed. An alternative solution is to manually remove all instances of the key "CachePolicy" from Accounts.plist.

I, too, have this issue and it is driving me NUTS. If anyone out there can help I would appreciate it enormously!

Same here. MacBook Pro 15" with Retina Display.

Tried repairing security permissions - no change.

Tried rebuilding mail by deleting the envelope files as follows, but no change:

"You can rebuild the Envelope-Index by throwing it away, it's located at ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/

1.Your Library folder is hidden by default. Select Finder (in the dock) > “Go to Folder” and then enter “~/Library.”

2.In ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData, delete any file that begins with “Envelope Index,” such as Envelope Index or Envelope Index-shm.

3.Mail will rebuild the Envelope index when it is reopened. It will take a few minutes to rebuild the entire index."

I have multiple accounts, so I went into Mail, Preferences, Accounts and disabled all but one account to try and isolate it. This then worked OK.

So I re-enabled one account at a time and each time checked whether it worked. One by one they were re-enabled and worked OK.

In the end I had re-enabled all of the accounts that I disabled, and it was working. Can't explain it.

Same issue: Welcome to Mail evry mail stratup. MBP 13" 2012 i7. Have tried to isolate by disabling accounts and rebuilding mailboxes, but still it goes on. So far Mail working outside of this annoyance.

Greg, I tried your solution. No Joy! I guess I'll have to look elsewhere for an answer. I'm glad it worked for you. One exception to your method; I didn't delete the Envelope Index files, I just renamed them. As it turns out, this was a good safety measure as after the index rebuild only a handful of recent emails were accessable. Restoring the original files returned the database.

I didn't find that this worked quite as advertised. I had two disabled accounts that had not been "downloaded" during the initial launch of Mavericks Mail. Disabling all the active accounts as described above didn't eliminate the opening dialog box; only when I activated the two disabled accounts, let them begin to download, quit, and relaunched did the initial dialog finally disappear. I infer that Mavericks Mail keeps a list of all accounts that have been (even partially) downloaded, and as long as as any account remains uninitialized, the dialog will continue to appear.

Success! Thank you all for the support you have provided. The key was in renabling ALL the accounts. I had only been renabling the accounts I routinely send/receive from/to, as the other accounts forward to them. Now that all is well, I have once again disabled the forwarding accounts and Mail is behaving.

I had the same problem.

I tried this solution but it did not work as stated.

I have registered 4 accounts in Mail, 2 are permanently used, and 2 others have been sleeping for a long time.

So I started Mail, opened the Preferences, activated all 4 accounts, closed Mail.

Started Mail again, the "Welcome" message has now disappeared, opened the Preferences, de-activated the 2 accounts I never use, close Mail.

Restart Mail, the problem is solved.

Thanks, this helped me - I have a few older accounts from servers that are no longer accessible.

Turning the accounts I use on/off was not enough.

1) Turn on all accounts. Don't worry about entering passwords, innaccesible servers, etc. Just click the enable box

2) Quit Mail, Relaunch Mail

3) Turn off all accounts.

4) Quit Mail, Relaunch Mail

5) Re-enable just the accounts you use.

6) Test: Quit Mail, Relaunch Mail

Same problem on mid 2010 15" MacBook Pro. No solution found yet. I upgraded two 2011 mac mini's and a 2007 iMac without issue, but have the persistant "Welcome to Mail" on the MBP.

Same here, on a Mac mini Mid 2011.

Thanks FMaclk, that worked for me!

Tried disabling accounts/stopping mail/restarting mail/enabling accounts as suggested.

Still "No Joy!"

I wish one of these solutions would work on my MBP

Thank you! This worked for me 🙂