Troubleshooting Email Problems in Apple Mail for OSX
What to do when Apple Mail seemingly stops working for no apparent reason? In this article we cover a quick array of possible problem areas, from network issues, mailbox corruption and even settings, help you to track down and debug the potential problems with crashing, slowness and connectivity that you might encounter with your Mac and email.
Connection Problems
Not to state the obvious, but the starting place would be to check to see if you haven’t lost temporary internet connection. Wireless could drop, or even your internet cnnection itself could go awry. Assuming you have full web connectivity, that you can surf the web without problems and that other mailboxes are working fine, then its time to start looking under the hood. If you have multiple email inboxes on different servers coming to the same inbox, and none work, then chances are that the connection is playing up,
Is Your Mailbox Offline?
If your mailbox becomes inaccessible for whatever reason, then it is possible that it will go “offline” this is highlighted by the “lightning bolt circle” to the right of the index. Once you have established that the internet is working fine, then I would suggest taking the account online again by clicking on the “lightning bolt” and responding accordingly to the resulting dialog box. If you get mail again and the mail box remains unavailable the inbox will go “offline” again and you need to start looking elsewhere.
The Activity Window and Connection Doctor
A way to tell what is going on in Apple Mail and in your email inbox is to open the Activity Window, either from the Window drop menu or using the keyboard shortcut Apple Key + 0, that being said any activity you see might fly by. An alternative to this is to open the Connection Doctor, also from the Window drop menu. The connection doctor is designed to highlight where things are working and not working, and where not, to provide the viewer with possible errors reported either by Apple Mail or by the connecting email server.
Check On The Server Using Webmail
If you think that everything is absolutely fine in Apple Mail and that there are problems on the web server, I would suggest going online using your webmail client, and check the actual contents of your email inbox on the server. If you do not have web mail access, or unaware of the details, I would suggest speaking to your email provider about the details of it. Once logged in, assuming everything is fine with your email there.
Other Possible Connection-related Email Problems
Able to Receive Email But Unable to Send
If you are able to recieve but unable to send emails, then it is possible that the provider of the connection you are currently using has blocked the standard means of communication - SMTP port 25 - used to relay emails out of their network. I personally get around this by running a secondary email service on a non standard port, so it might be worth asking your provider if they have such a thing, otherwise, if you are on business, consider either, switching to webmail temporarily, or turning your email inbox into an IMAP account.
Emails Are Being Duplicated
Sometimes, if you are running IMAP, and the internet connection is exceedinly slow, you might see behaviour whereby Apple Mail is downloading multiple copies of the same email. This is not a problem with Mail itself but more due to the slowness of the net connection and the ability of Apple Mail to thus sync properly with the IMAP server.
Crashing and General Slowness
Rebuild Mailbox Index
To fix slowness, possible discrepancies in the mailbox index and that on the server, plus possible crashing, it would be worth considering a rebuild of the inbox email index. I would suggest a back of of your emails before doing this, incase anything goes wrong, but as yet I have never rebuilt an inbox and encountered any problems. That being said, it is always better to be safe than sorry. If your inbox is slow and you have tens of thousands of emails in it, then besides just rebuilding the index, archive a bunch of the older emails to a folder “On Your Mac”. To rebuild in index, select therespective inbox and then select “Rebuild” under the mailbox drop menu.
Apple Mail Crashes On Startup
I have found int he past, though rarely, that soemtiems an emlx file will become corrupted and as a result when Mail tries to read the file it simply crashes. The only way i have found around this is to remove the files chunk at a time till the crashign stops. You will need to simply move them from /users/{USERNAME}/library/mail/ to another folder, hopefully identifying the offending file quickly.
Recovering, Converting & Importing Emails
There are a couple of applications, MBOX-to-EMLX converter and Emailchamy which are fit for this purpose and reviewed more extensively in my article: “ Importing Recovered Or Legacy Emails to Apple Mail“. These are perfect when handling a post-crash scenario.
Conclusion: Various Methods and Tools
As you can see there are a number of means by which to figure out some of the potential problems with Apple Mail, some simpler than others. If you were unable to find a solution here, might I suggest that you switch over to the Apple Discussion Forums and search or ask people the answer to your problem there, alternatively, head down to your local Apple Store and speak to a Mac Genius.
Whatever you chose to do, I wish you good luck with finding a solution to your problem.
