I keep seeing "searching for senders' image" in the Activity panel and mail is frozen while it's there. I have the "use images" setting unchecked. Very annoying.
I see that people have posted the same question several times over the years and it hasn't been answered.
iMac (21.5-inch Late 2009), OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)
Hi, no idea really, but have you added the sender to your Contacts? is there an image there?
Have you highlighted that email account & used Mail's Rebuild from the Mailbox menu item?
Other things to try...
Bootup holding CMD+r, or the Option/alt key to boot from the Restore partition & use Disk Utility from there to Repair the Disk, then Repair Permissions.
Similar or same issue here: Mail stuck searching for senders image and loading contacts
"searching for sender's image" causes Mail to freeze
