For more than a decade, I’ve used my iMac (recently replaced by a Mac Studio) as my email hub, with Apple’s Mail and Spamsieve leading the charge. I have about 8 different email accounts that Mail & Spamsieve manage. This combination works well, except for when it doesn’t. That being about every few weeks, when Mail crashes, and stops responding. I then have to Force Quit Mail, and then restart it. Because of the Force Quit, Spamsieve won’t load, complaining that mail unexpectedly quit, and that it will load the next time mail is started.
I’m leaving on a 3 week vacation soon, and would love to not have to contend with Mail, so I’m reaching out to you all, for your very considered suggestions and responses.
Are you running your own server? Or are you using a POP account on another server and using the mac to pull the mail down regularly? Have you beed doing it for a long time?
Reason I ask is that I am still a POP account user and have 28 separate mail accounts that I use for various purposes in Apple Mail. I too was having problems with the Mail app on my iMac crashing regularly. The issue is that I must have hit some sort of limit on the numbers of mail messages it sould store. I ad to extract out decades worth of old mail into anothere location and off of my iMac mail system before it started working correctly. If you have many thousands of messages saved I’d look at a way to archive them and then delete them out of Apple Mail.
But be cautious, Do very good backups before during and after the migration of email and before you do any mass deletes. I did mine a year at a time with a full bootable backup after each extraction and while they were all in the trash and then another after I had emptied the trash in mail before I moved on to the next year’s archive messages.
I have three mail accounts, I don’t use any plugins, and I’ve got around 13,000 emails archived. I’ve got two Exchange accounts and one IMAP account. I don’t remember the last time I saw Mail crash. My system is very simple, if I need to keep an email, I archive it. If not, I delete it. I keep Mail running all the time on my iMac, but I don’t do anything special to keep my iMac on all the time. When it goes to sleep, it goes to sleep and I deal with the mail later.
When I hit the limits I had over 83,000 stored emails that I refer to regularly. Those emails go back over 20 years. (I’ve migrated them as I changed applications and mail systems)