Mail.app preventing shutdown or restart

[ijordano]

I've been looking for a fix for this issue for about ten years, across several Macs and countless MacOS updates, but can't seem to find a solution -

Any time I try to shut down or restart my Mac and Mail.app is open, all my other apps will close in preparation for the shut down but mail will just sit there happy to be in the way, until I either have to force quit the app or occasionally ill get a "Mail prevented shut down" message.

Does anyone have a fix for this? Reinstalling MacOS doesn't help, I've set up as new, ive rebuilt the mailbox and countless other solutions found online, but most posts that I can find are 6/7 years old now and it's been a while since I tried posting about it myself.

 

[NoBoMac]

Change email providers?

I have never had this problem (3x Gmail, Outlook, iCloud) but I have seen it on my mother's Mac and her Cox account (only email she has). But since Cox has moved to Yahoo!, seems to work fine. Or at least a lot better than before.

Always chalked it up to a wonky IMAP implementation, servers on Cox's end. They have always seemed to be years behind everyone else re standards, functions.

 

[S.B.G]

Have you tried deleting all of the mail accounts/profiles, and starting over? Maybe something is borked in the account profile(s).

 

[chown33]

Have you tried deleting all of the mail accounts/profiles, and starting over? Maybe something is borked in the account profile(s).

You could test that by creating another Mac account, then running Mail.app there.
And instead of deleting accounts, start with no accounts and add them one by one.

Login only to the new account, and launch Mail.app.
Make sure it has no email accounts present.
With Mail.app running, does the Mac restart or shutdown correctly?

If so, then login to new account again, and add one email account.
With Mail.app running, does the Mac restart or shutdown correctly?

If so, keep adding email accounts until it doesn't.

 

[adrianlondon]

Window / Activity (in Mail): is anything running?