Major Mail problems

[Cave Man]

Really not sure what the problem is so I'm hoping someone can help me.

I'm on Sequoia 15.5 (waiting for an app to finish data crunching before updating to 15.6) with Mail and two servers, Exchange and iCloud that were set up about 10 day ago. The iCloud mail is working perfectly well; however, the Exchange is not. I have emails back to July 31, then the next email is from January 9!!! The emails in-between have disappeared sometime in the last few days or week. They were there because I remember reading them.

The other problem is searching for an email gets stuck on "Searching..." with no progress, again Exchange only; iCloud is working just fine.

I have done Mailbox > Rebuild but that does not seem to fix it. I suppose the next step is to reboot the computer and update to 15.6. But in the mean time, does anyone have suggestions as to what might be occurring and what I should try to fix it?

 

[adrianlondon]

You could download Outlook (or log in via a browser) just to check your mails are actually all there and where they should be.

If they are, then deleting and re-adding the account (for Apple Mail) may help.

 

[Cave Man]

If I log onto my Outlook Web via Safari, all the emails are there. But for some reason Mac Mail is not downloading them. This is really a weird issue.

I'll delete the account and then add it again to see if that solves the problem

Thanks.

 

[Cave Man]

So, deleting and re-adding the account solved the missing emails; however, now when new emails arrive they get stuck for about a minute or so on "Loading..." Any idea what might cause this?

 

[adrianlondon]

So, deleting and re-adding the account solved the missing emails; however, now when new emails arrive they get stuck for about a minute or so on "Loading..." Any idea what might cause this?

Do you have any third-party firewall, port blocker, network monitor running?

You could try toggling the setting(s) under settings / privacy.

Or it could be an Exchange thing - dunno.

 

[Cave Man]

None that I’m aware of. I’m letting Mail run overnight to see if that fixes it.

 

[auxbuss]

Do you have any "Rules"? A couple of years ago, these slowed down quite a bit. I think what happens now is that the rules are applied only after all mail has downloaded. Until that happens, all mail exists in some weird liminal space known only to Apple.

That said, macOS Mail is a strange beast. Every few months I pop into it's ~/Library files to clean up the mess its left behind.

 

[Cave Man]

No, no rules in place. It seems to be running better this morning, but I'll have a better feel in a few days if there are no hiccups.

 

[ThrowerGB]

That said, macOS Mail is a strange beast. Every few months I pop into it's ~/Library files to clean up the mess its left behind.

Would you give us some more detail on the "mess" and what you do to "clean up". I'm sure some of us might like to see if that helps on our systems.

 

[auxbuss]

Would you give us some more detail on the "mess" and what you do to "clean up". I'm sure some of us might like to see if that helps on our systems.

Sure. Mail caches stuff locally in ~/Library/Mail/V10/ and does a poor job of tidying up, especially drafts. If you explore that directory with something like ncdu, you'll probably find that it's quite large, possibly huge. (Nosing around with Finder would be a bit of a trial because the depth of the folders to reach the messages is quite deep.)

Ignore the Maildata/ directory. It contains, among other things, a cache that can become quite large. But so far, it reliably removes stuff after a month/30 days.

The other folders are each of your mail accounts, including the On My Mac account. I have no idea how the On My Mac account behaves, as I don't use it. I only use IMAP accounts, which store emails on the remote server.

Now, most folk will be uncomfortable deleting these folders, but – providing your emails are stored remotely – you can do that. The folder structures will be recreated when you next open mail. DO NOT DO THIS IF YOUR MAIL IS ONLY STORED LOCALLY. I would also not do this if you don't really understand how email works.

Regardless, most folk will just be looking to delete large files that have been left undeleted locally in the cache, and again, something like ncdu will make identifying them easy. You'll probably want to examine the contents of these large files to remind yourself what they are, and then delete them.