Mail freezes

Mail 9.2. IMAP account. Occasionally when I click on an email in the Inbox, (or Sent, or Trash) Mail will freeze. I then have to close and reopen and it's OK for a few hours.

I did a Rebuild of the Inbox. (Menu > Mailbox > Rebuild) but that did not solve it.

I was reading on the 'Net about doing a "Reindex" by going in to the Library > Mail > V2 > MailData and deleting the Envelope Index, Envelope Index-shm and Envelope Index-wal files and re-booting. (Those 3 files for me are actually in a V3 folder. My V2 only has one file - Accounts.plist)

Is it safe to delete those files? And will it actually resolve the freezing issue?

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Since installing El Capitan both my wife's and my iMacs have had a similar problem. The mouse can't highlight individual e-mails. The solution seems to be to use the keyboard up/ down key or to to quit Macmail and reopen it. This is really not very satisfactory and never happened before we installed El Capitan.

For Alwyn in particular:

I'm not saying this is necessarily the problem; but in El Capitan, you can single-swipe left or right on the Mouse which Marks as Unread or Deletes/Archives (depending on you you set this up). I've found many times, that if you click to highlight an email, my finger must just slightly move left or right — not enough to bring up these options, but enough to freeze the email. I just click on an empty space and then re-highlight the email.

I find this a very irritating new feature in El Capitan (meant to mirror iOS). This might be what is happening to you.

For Barrygou, less certain this is the problem, but.....

Ian

I had the same problem as IWT, so I went into Mail/Preferences and on the Viewing tab, clicked on Use Classic Layout. That disables the swiping and the mouse is much more stable. I have no idea how Apple tests this stuff, but it must be done by people with rock-steady hands not using the Magic mouse.

There you are, a nice solution. Worth a try, guys?

Ian

It would be better to be able just to disable mouse swipes, but that isn't an option. Maybe next time?

While I have had similar experiences I have an other issue, if I leave the mail program open in the task bar it will crash or shutdown the computer after a while.
If I quit the e-mail program all is well.

To MacInwin. Thanks for the Classic layout suggestion. We're trying it out. To Pasquanel. That sounds like a different issue. What OSX version do you have? When you say Task Bar presumably you mean the Dock, the Apple equivalent. Also what version of Mail do you have?

I have found that if I have too many applications running at once my iMac freezes necessitating the use of the power button but this sounds more like an issue that just relates to Mail.

Hi Alwyn, I'm running 10.11.3 mail is 9.3 and yes I was referring to the dock old habits die hard! This has been happening for a while now even when I had Yosemite.
If I quit mail in the dock no problems but if I leave it running it could crash at any time usually after a while but not always.

i think I solved my issue. Mail was freezing when I moved from email to email within the Inbox. I believe it was because of the swiping feature that allows delete etc. I loaded MagicPrefs and tunred off swiping. All is good now.

Good for you. My point in post #4. The swiping feature is so sensitive - at least in my clumsy hands. Wish there was a way to disable it within Apple preferences.

Ian

I put feedback in to Apple saying we should have the option to turn off swiping in the Mail app.
You can leave feedback here. http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Scroll down to the OS X Apps to find Mail

My problems running Mac Mail in Yosemite have cleared up since I started leaving the Accounts preferences window open at all times.