Q: Mail not working with El Capitan

This didn't work for me.  while doing the mandatory Mail import after moving from 10.10.5 to 10.11.1, the count hangs at message 1224 (out of 96518) with no further progress.

Just installed Apple El Capitan update 11.10.1. Mail now working.

Well done apple

Paul Taylor

Did not work for me.

What a can of worms! The update seemed (??) to fix some things with mail, but mail still gets its knickers in a knot (and mine in the process). Imports and transfers take like forever, usually hang, and often crash mail out.

I am not merely miffed, i am exasperated and ropable at the loss of so many hours trying to fix apple's mess and the problems caused my business through email stuff-ups.

Steve would not be impressed with releasing an OS that was this flakey. It seems that El Capitan (el CEO) is more concerned with promoting gay interests than developing and promoting Apple products.

It is politically incorrect to rant in these forms.

It did not fix my mail issue.  I've worked for hours, trying everything.  Can you tell me how to go back to an older operating system?  When you did this, did your issues resolve?  Thanks

My mail is also screwed up says it can,t log into server and it won,t let me make any changes when I try it just sits there for 10 minutes with the wheel spinning and then I get a red message saying account already exists. in the end I had to install a 3rd party e-mail client so I could get my mail. I,ve never seen anything like this before the mail app seems to just ignore what I want it to do. it,s simply useless. installing another mail app seems like giving up but it did fix the problem with ease.

Install El Capitan Update, it resolved my email issues

It made mine worse! Before installing, at least I had all my old mail, important ones in my main inbox, after install, they all vanished! I’ve never known Apple get something so wrong!

Apple will never admit to getting it 'so wrong'.

I too have updated to the newer version and still my Mail problems remain.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that Mail is now less stable than before. I have noticed that it does its own thing from time to time.

Apple in their creation of El Capitan has done something to corrupt passwords in Mail. As many seem to resolve their issues by recreating their Mailboxes using third party apps.

Still not working for me despite removing then re installing account complete with new password. Very frustrating...

Got sick of Yosemite due to longstanding and seemingly unsolvable problems, with frequent loss of WiFi connection. Thought updating to El Capitan might solve that issue - after all it couldn't be any worse. I was wrong - it could be worse. Now with this benighted El Capitan update, I have WiFi dropping out every few minutes as before, plus as a bonus, a total lack of email. Now I can neither send nor receive emails. Have installed 10.1.1 too by the way. Nice one Apple.

I am rather elderly and not very technically savvy, so all I think I can do is hope that Apple eventually sort out these issues (which appear to be widespread) via a proper update. Meanwhile I'll just keep taking the blood pressure pills, which, if there was any justice in the world, Apple would be buying for me.

Good luck all.

My wifi issues were fixed by unplugging my router and plugging it back in (or push the reset button on the back).  As far as apple supplying your pills,  would you trust them to work?

I have a 2012 vintage 13" Macbook Pro with a hard drive, my husband has the 2012 vintage Retina display Macbook Pro with flash memory.  We keep both our OSs fairly current.   We don't need to be on the "bleeding" edge of technology, so not intererested in participating in any betas, but we are definitely not being dragged to the latest levels.  I upgraded to El Capitan on my Macbook on Oct. 15th after I saw all the glowing reports in the media.  I had no problems on mine Macbook, so a few days later, I upgraded my husband's Mac to El Capitan.  He had an initial problem sending emails, but I was able to fix it by going into Mail preferences and fix the SMTP settings that the upgrade had changed.  (My ISP (inmotionhosting.com) uses port 465 for SSL IMAP outgoing (SMTP) and 993 for SSL IMAP incoming and those had gotten changed to back to the usual suppects of 587 and 43, respectively.  Also, the IMAP PATH had gotten blanked out, so I had to reset it to INBOX).  He then went out of town and all **** broke loose on his Mac while at his client's site.   He was getting invalid SMTP server error messages and invalid server certificate messages whenever he tried to send anything.  He was able to receive emails with no problems. I talked him through fixing the SMTP advanced settings and trusting the certificate pop-ups  and all would be fine for a few more hours before the errors occurred again.  I didn't know if changing locations (client to hotel back  to client) was contributing to the issue.   He finally got so frustrated that I had him delete his email accounts and re-add one back.  Btw, both of his email accounts are hosted in the same domain on our ISP. 

Once he got back home and I was able to "drive" his Mac for myself, I was prompted about the untrusted SMTP server certifcate and I selected to "Always" trust it. (There are three different statements that has to be set to "trust", in order for it to be "always".)   I unchecked the "Automatically detect and maintain account settings" in both places for the mail account, on the Advanced tab for the IMAP account and on the Advanced tab for the SMTP server.  I had it unchecked on the SMTP settings but not on the IMAP Advanced panel.  I haven't had a problem sending emails since. However, the mail app wouldn't  stop downloading the mail.  I could only guess that it was downloading the same mail over and over because his mail file has around 34,000 messages and it had downloaded over 2 million messages before I stopped it. 

I tried deleting his mail account again and re-adding, to no avail.   I found DeMinister's post about deleting everything in the V3/maildata folder and that fixed the continuous downloading problems.   (Since I had never had to do something like this on a Mac before, I had to figure out how to get to the hidden system files in the Library folder.  In a Finder window, hold down the Option key and select the Go menu.  The Library folder will be shown and you can open the Library folder from there.)  I drilled down until I found the V3/maildata folder.  I quit the mail app leaving the one email account configured. Since, I am  super cautious (30+ year computer programmer makes you that way), I copied all the files in that folder into a "safekeeping" folder and then sent the original files to the trash.  When I opened up the Mail app, the app upgraded the mail account.  I then held my breath (not required, but I couldn't help myself) and watched as the mail app downloaded mail and stop after downloading only really new mail.  I was able to send email with no problems.

I chose to add his second email account in two steps.  I quit the mail app.  Then, I went to System Preferences -> Internet Accounts and added the second mail account through that interface.  (It really would be helpful if Apple would let me enter all of the mail settings via that panel interface, but at least I could set the IMAP PATH prefix before opening the Mail app.   I opened the Mail app.  and took the new account offline (Mailbox -> Online Status  and then selected the new account offline.  Its mail had already started to download, but that stopped it)  Then through the Mail Preferences panel, I fixed all the settings, i.e., unchecked the "Automatically detect and maintain account settings" box in both places, and specified the correct SSL port numbers for incoming and outgoing mail.  I forced a save of the settings by clicking on the "Junk Mail" tab and responding to the pop up to save my changes. (A trick I discovered to confirm that my changes were saved) I then closed the Accounts panel and brought the email account back online.  So far so good.  The mail finished its download and stopped.   Since the server certificate was already trusted with the first email account, I was not prompted to trust it again when I sent an email with this email account.  The real  test is when my husband goes out of town and tries to connect to his email via a different network.  Fingers Crossed!!

Update:  I just installed the 10.11.1 Update and the problems did not return.  For those of you who have installed this update and are having problems with Mail, please see my long winded post  above.  It may still fix your problems even though the descriptions of the fixes in 10.11.1 sure sounded like they would fix the problems I was experiencing on my husband's Mac.  Sure sad to hear that people are still having problems with this latest update.