'Mail' failing to function on any OS above Mojave?

TidBITS Talk
1

Hello and Happy New Year, one and all!

The CBC, Canadian media, sometime around the second half of July into August of last summer published an article advising Mac users to upgrade their OS above and beyond Mojave, because of security problems associated with this particular OS version.

Since then, being a good kid that I am, I upgraded my three main computers to Big Sur, Catalina, and Monterey. Ever since, my e-mail has been a complete failure. The program simple stops responding. I’ve found some success by simply deleting all the preference files, causing Mail to effectively, ‘rebuild’ itself. Usually, this solution only worked for a few days, and at best, a week. After this period of some success, I was right back in my previous predicament of Apple Mail simply not working.

My three main machines are: a 27” retina iMac with the memory completely full with 32 GBs, an M1 Mac mini with 16b GB of memory, and, a 21.5” iMac also with a complete memory of 16 GB.

What I find odd, is that Mail does not work on any of these machines, when they’re running Big Sur, Catalina, or Monterey [not possible on my old 27” iMac]?

‘Activity doctor’ within Mail confirms the the program is successfully connecting with the servers.

I’ve had no continuous success with any possible solutions found online to this problem.

Can anyone please suggest possible solutions to this problem?

I’m only able to send this out, and use Mail, as I’m doing so from an internal drive partition dedicated to Mojave. The other two partitions on my internal, 3 TB Fusion drive containing Big Sur and Catalina, consistently fail to provide conventional email services.

Is this sort of stalled behaviour, of Mail an indication that mailboxes themselves are too big for Mail to handle?

I’ve checked numerous times with my ISP, Rogers here in Canada, and their services have been fine, at the time of my inquiring.

…. I confess to being truly baffled by this predicament, as a long-time Mac user since 1987?

Cheers!

Bill Taylor

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This sounds like a problem associated with your account, so not something that Rogers would see as affecting everyone, but something in your particular mail store.

I don’t know how to work around it, but you might try looking at things in Sent and Draft and the like and see if there’s a message there that looks funny or behaves oddly. Something that Mail would be looking at every time it launches.

It would also be worth trying mail at iCloud as well, and see if that has any issues. I’d bet not, but it’s worth testing.

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I’ve seen some -invalid- assumptions made about email account settings (POP or IMAP), and Apple quietly changing things to “be what Apple thinks is correct.” Look at the ‘advanced settings’ for the account in Mail.app and check with Rogers to verify that port numbers, in particular, are correct.

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I had my Apple Mail become almost impossible to open and very sluggish. I tried just about everything. I finally deleted all the mail accounts off my Mac. Even going into to library to remove all traces of data stores, preferences, etc. making the Mac think this was a brand new instantiation of Apple Mail. On next launch, I pointed it to my multiple email accounts (I don’t do POP) and let it rebuild all my folders, I had to recreate my rules, signatures, etc. but it now works flawless. My lesson, years of “update in place” finally had something get squished.

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