El Capitan Mail - Checking for mail loop and crash

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Level 1

9 points

El Capitan Mail - Checking for mail loop and crash

After updating to El Capitan, I am having an issue with Mail where it seems to be stuck in a loop checking for mail. Here is what is happing:

I have 5 IMAP email accounts (all Virgin Media, if that makes a difference) plus Gmail (also IMAP, I believe). If I disable all accounts except Gmail, everything is fine. If any of the Virgin Media accounts are active, "Checking for mail" appears in the status bar and the new message counter just keeps going up and up, until it is much higher than the total number of emails I have in all my mailboxes (I have approximately 45000 emails in total and the counter has got higher than 200000). Sometimes the counter resets and starts again at 0 new messages. This doesn't stop until I disable all the non-Gmail accounts. Genuine new emails do seem to be coming though but I sometimes need to restart Mail to get the unread counts to appear correctly. Sometimes the Mail application crashes when left running in the background for a while and I suspect that this may be related.

Has anybody else experienced this and does anybody have an idea about what I could try in order to resolve this?

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on Oct 7, 2015 11:40 AM

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Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,739 points

Nov 1, 2015 3:04 AM in response to srollason

Please back up all data, then open the Internet Accounts pane in System Preferences. Make a note of the settings for the last IMAP account that you added, then delete the account. The messages will remain on the server. If Mail works now, recreate the account with the same settings and test.

If Mail still crashes, repeat with each of the other IMAP accounts.

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Answer 2

Oct 31, 2015 3:05 AM in response to Linc Davis

I'm having the save problem with the 'New Message' loop in El Capitan email.

This fix didn't work for me.

First time I tried it the account was removed (I checked), I quit email, restarted and the account had re-appeared.
I tried again and the email account had definitely gone. When I restarted email and tried to add the account mail says 'Account already exists'!

Generally a lot of very weird behaviour around email. I'm using virginmedia email in the UK - I wonder if this problem is specific to virgin?

I've just tried adding the account again but through the Mail->Accounts... menu. It fails with 'Page you requested is not valid' but I then get a notification about google wanting me to enter a password for the account.

Virgin changed from a gmail-based system to an in-house system about 4 weeks ago, is it possible that El Capitan knows about some of the old gmail settings and is getting confused after the migration to the new virgin servers?

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Answer 3

Oct 31, 2015 4:09 AM in response to srollason

I think in the end deleting the accounts from Internet Accounts worked. The problem I think I was having was because the apple ID associated with the iCloud account was the same as the account name for the virgin email account. So even though the email account had been deleted, when i tried to re-create it mail was seeing the same name associated in some weird way with iCloud.

In the end I resolved the problem by deleting all accounts in Internet Accounts and mail and then re-creating. So far so good...

BTW - Virgin have admitted on their forum that their service has a known problem with El Capitan mail which they are working to fix.

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Answer 4

srollason Author

Level 1

9 points

Nov 1, 2015 3:03 AM in response to Linc Davis

I ended up deleting and recreating the accounts as you suggested and I haven't had any more mail checking loops or crashes from Mail since, so it seems to have worked, thanks.

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