OK – I’m very open to any insight on this – it’s got me baffled.
Georgie mentioned to me a few days ago that whenever she opened Mail on the laptop it would start to open and then crash. When pressed, she could not remember when the problem started – but “several months ago!” We have a Microsoft 365 subscription and we both tend to use Outlook as our main email program and mainly have mail set-up for our iCloud email accounts – so she had not bothered too much as she also uses her iPhone and iPad for email and mail was working fine to access her iCloud account on both devices. However she mentioned that she sometimes wanted to work on a bigger screen and so it was very annoying – so I said I would take a look. I won’t go into all the tortuous steps I have been through to narrow down the problem. However, after much research and trial & error, I can now reliably create the conditions which consistently cause the crash – I just can’t figure out WHY!! So, the facts: The problem occurs on two different computers – an iMac and a MacBook Pro both maxed out at El Capitan 10.11.6. The problem only occurs when she accesses her iCloud account – no problems with her Internode email account on the same machines. She reports no problems accessing this account with an old iPhone 4 or an old iPad mini. I have no problems with my user account accessing my iCloud account. The problem was that Mail crashed as soon as she selected her iCloud inbox. I managed to ascertain that the problem was limited to the inbox – no problems with the sent folder (or drafts/trash/junk folders). My first thought was that there was some corrupted email in her iCloud inbox that was causing the problem so: I managed to slide the preview pane out of the way so that I could just see the list of emails in the inbox – this worked OK. To try and identify any problematic email, I then opened blocks of individuals emails into their own individual windows. At the end I had opened every single individual email with no problems! I rebuilt the mailbox (and other iCloud mailboxes, such as sent, for good measure) None of this seemed to have any effect: Without the email preview pane, the iCloud inbox could be selected and the list of messages displayed just fine and individual messages could be opened (even multiple windows of 20 or 30 emails at a time). With any other mailbox – both different iCloud mailboxes (such as Sent) and the inbox of another email account (like the Internode email) the preview pane displayed normally. With the preview pane displayed selecting the iCloud inbox caused the Mail app to crash. At this point, logic deserted me! By searching online, I could find many reports of various problems causing mail to crash – but none that remotely resembled this scenario. I found the actual trigger by accident: Without the email preview pane, the iCloud inbox was selected and the list of messages displayed just fine. I then SLOWLY opened the preview pane by dragging across the list window. At first the preview pane displayed OK but when I got to a certain width, the app just crashed! This seems to be consistent behaviour – when the width of the list pane gets down to a certain size the app crashes – but only for this mailbox!! So…. A replicable problem but no idea what causes it for this mailbox on 2 different computers! I still sort of feel that the problem may be down to a particular email – but no clue as to what/how. Anyway, once I narrowed down the fault trigger, it occurred to me that reverting to the “classical” layout – with the preview pane below the message link would be a workaround – which it is. Georgie is happy enough – she has a workable solution and does not particularly care about the how/why! Of course, I find not knowing the how/why infuriating!! But I’ve wasted enough time for now!! Anyway if anybody else has seen this or has any insight, I would be very grateful ! Cheers Neil
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