apple mail doesn't stop sending out of office rule

In Mail menu under Mail, select preferences. Open to the Accounts tab and select the account in the sidebar. Uncheck Enable this account. It's easier than deleting the account completely.

You would disable the account on one computer and test to determine if that device is the cause of the problem.

The files will rebuild themselves when you start mail again. The reason for deleting them was to get rid of any corruption that may have occurred.

The files in the trash should not influence the application itself, but you have to quit Mail before removing the files. I'm not sure what happened in your case.

Rules in Mail can sometimes be a little glitchy sometimes. For an Out of Office Response, rules should work. However, usually the providers website has a vacation response settings there. For Apple email, go to iCloud.com website and log in there with your apple id. In Mail preferences there, you can set your vacation response there. Should be the same for others such as ATT, Gmail, etc. Since you are setting it directly at the server site, you would insure a better response since you will not be relying on a computer or another mail program with rules which have to download an unread message to implement them.

For mail programs, apple mail is a good basic in my opinion, but there are many others such as Outlook. If you need a more complex program, then you will just have to look around an find one that suits all of your needs.

I would want to verify which computer is causing the problem. It was a rule created, so deleting an account may not fix the problem. It would probably return when you add the account back.

I would first disable the account on the computer where the rule was created and see if that stops the vacation response. If it does, you can go from there.

In Mail preferences, Account tab, then Account information> uncheck Enable this account.

Does this happen with more than one provider such as gmail, apple email, etc? Test sending messages from each account to know for sure which are involved.

Once again, you need to be sure what device is causing the problems. Quit Mail on one device and test on the others until you are certain of which is causing the problem.

You posted in El Capitan. Is that the OS you are using? Paste ~/Library/ and that should get you to your home library folder. You can follow the path manually. Depending on the OS, you may have a V2, V3, or V4 folder.

Hope that works better for you.

Are you sure they are the same response as the rule you created? Do you have other computers that may have synced to the same rules?

Go to the webmail site and check to see if a vacation response may have been set there.

For apple mail, it's iCloud.com. In settings, there is a Vacation Response.

For other providers, you will have to go to their website.

For your computers, you will probably need to eliminate which is causing the problem. You may have to open Mail preferences and disable the account on one device and test on the other until you verify which is the cause. Then you can work on it from there.