Mail freezes .. Spinning beachball after a couple of minutes

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129 points

Mail freezes .. Spinning beachball after a couple of minutes

Since upgrading to Ventura 13.6 Mail has become unusable. After opening it, it tries downloading emails from the server and a min later I get the spinning beach ball and it becomes unresponsive. Only option is to force quit and re-open.

I have deactivated all my Google accounts, leaving just my iCloud account active, still crashes. I have launched into Safe Mode, still crashes.

I am unsure what to do next. Is there a way to Delete and Re-install Mail?

I am running an iMac 27" 5K Retina 2017 model.

Thanks

Nic

Posted on Oct 5, 2023 11:03 AM

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Answer 1

Nic P Author

Level 1

129 points

Oct 5, 2023 02:29 PM in response to Nic P

Update on the problem.....

It seems linked to my user account. I created a new account on the Mac and opened Mail. I had to add the account from scratch. After adding my iCloud account it started to download messages. No freezing. So I logged back into my original account, deleted the old account, deleted everything in the ~/Library/Mail/ folder (I do have several TimeMachine Backups to restore if that turns out to be catastrophic) and Mail seems to now behave again.

Downloading the 26K messages from my Gmail account, so let's see if this remains stable.. I will then add all my other email accounts, and leave iCloud for last.

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Answer 2

Nic P Author

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129 points

Oct 8, 2023 04:54 AM in response to Nic P

So the problem got resolved by deleting the contents of ~/Library/Mail/ and then setting up all the accounts from scratch. Anything that was saved to my Mac was lost, but that's fine as it was mostly old emails from a couple of decades ago..

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Answer 3

Dec 7, 2023 12:38 PM in response to Nic P

Sounds like I have the same issue but my email only seems to freeze when I use one of my gmail accounts. I have 4 email accounts. I disabled my iCloud account and then deleted my three gmail accounts. I added them all back to mail, one at a time. The spinning beach ball happened with the 4th email when it seemed to get stuck on "downloading messages", so I'm pretty sure it's that email account. This started happening after I began getting a "Delivery status notification (delay)" email to ***. I've been trying to unsubscribe from this email. I think things have been a little crazy since then.

Nic P, it sounds like creating a new user account may not be necessary since you figured out how to resolve things by deleting the contents of the library/ mail thing, correct? Trying to figure out if I need to do that step before deleting the content of that folder. And....do I need to delete all my email accounts before I do that step or not? Thanks!

[Edited by Moderator]

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Mail freezes .. Spinning beachball after a couple of minutes

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