Open Mail. Choose the Windows / Previous Recipients menu item.
Open Contacts. Add a new contact or edit any existing field and click Done.
Mail will crash.
I can reliably reproduce this in Monterey and the latest Sequoia. I don’t have Sonoma or Ventura installations to test on. This appears to be an otherwise harmless crash, with no data loss except that most immediate edit. I have filed a Feedback report.
;~}
Can confirm that this does not happen in my Big Sur installation. So whatever is causing it either isn’t present on my system or was introduced later than Big Sur.
On my MacBook Air (2020) running Sonoma 14.5, Mail crashes whenever I perform the open Previous Window, launch Contacts and add new contact.
It happens to me in Sonoma and in Ventura.
Same (Big Sur 11.7.10).
It seems OK on Ventura (13.6.7 latest on 2017 iMac).
BD
—
Bob Dahl
dahlb@icloud.com
Adding a contact crashes Mail on Ventura 13.6.7.
For what it’s worth, since I seldom use Mail, so my installation isn’t as “real” as those who do, I don’t see a crash when I open the Previous Recipients window, select a contact, and click Add to Contacts. It doesn’t always seem to add the contact (the first one works, subsequent adds don’t), but I experienced no crashes. This is in Sonoma 14.5.
FWIW from me, I just never look at previous recipients. I can’t remember the last time I did before I tested this on Sonoma and Ventura.
It’s not “select a contact and click Add to Contacts”.
It’s “open the Contacts app and add a new contact there”.
(I get the crash with Sonoma 14.5)
Ach, my apologies—I was assuming that because Mail was crashing that everything was taking place in Mail and that Add to Contacts button seemed to fit what you were describing. Moving too fast.
With that in mind, I can now reproduce the bug, and I think it’s actually a little worse than indicated. In Mail, if you open the Previous Recipients window and then close it, any change to a contact in Contacts will cause Mail to crash. In other words, you could have opened Previous Recipients quite some time before working in Contacts and Mail will still crash when you edit a contact in Contacts. (I’ve only across minutes at the moment, but I’ll set up a test that will allow hours to elapse shortly.) Plus, it makes no difference whether Contacts launches before or after Mail.
In other words, any invocation of the Previous Recipients window will set a trigger that will cause Mail to crash on the next edit in Contacts. I’ll file a bug as well, and I think this is worth a TidBITS article because it’s so easily reproduced but potentially difficult to pin down, depending on how long it is between opening Previous Recipients and working in Contacts.
Can consistently recreate this crash on Ventura. However, deleting a contact in Contacts doesn’t trigger it, only making a change to a record. I use BusyContacts normally, which also syncs to iCloud, no issues with this.
MacOS 14.5
Crashes Mail for me, as well. Good thing I don’t use Previous Recipients much.
Me too (Sonoma 14.5). Reported it to Apple.
Interesting! I just tested with Cardhop, and editing a contact, there crashes Mail just like Contacts, which leads me to believe that the problem is within Apple’s systemwide contact handling. I wonder why BusyContacts doesn’t trigger it?
I’ve now written up the TidBITS article. Let’s move future conversations to the article’s comment thread.