Mail.app and Exchange email

Tech Support
1

Since the weekend Mail.app on my Mac continually freezes and then causes my computer to freeze. Only cure is a force shutdown.

I am running High Sierra 10.12.6.

The account which causes the problem, I’m pretty sure, is my work account which uses an Exchange server. The IT guy says it is the latest public release.

No problems with Mail.app on my iPhone or iPad.

Only workaround so far is to use Outlook. I would prefer to use Mail.app if I can:

(1) I have 20+ years of muscle memory for keyboard commands

(2) I use the wonderful MailHub to autofill sent emails etc.

The IT guy proudly claimed his own Mac hasn’t needed to be rebooted for 3 months. I said mine wouldn’t either except for the problem with Mail.app and Exchange. He didn’t seem surprised there were issues.

Anyone know what is going on or have a suggestion for Mailhub functionality in Outlook, please?

2

I suggest swapping out your IT guy. What an ass.
Have you tried disabling that account in Mail? Sounds like you have multiple, and this would be a way to tell for sure.
I believe there’s an option to rebuild the mailbox (or words to that effect), also worth a shot.

3

I agree with John. I would try and rebuild the mailbox first. I like to use OnyX. If that doesn’t work, then I would try deleting that mail account and adding it as new again.

4

Thanks, I forgot about OnyX.

Tried the rebuild. No luck. Left on overnight; came in this morning to a “crashed” computer.

Very frustrating!

5

You might want to try uninstalling MailHub and see if that improves things. I say that because

(1) both my 2017 iMac and my wife’s 2018 MacBook Pro are both using Exchange with Mail.app without any issues, and I am unaware of any problems with my friends and colleagues using the same setups;

(2) in my experience, Mail.app when configured with an Exchange account does not work very well with mail plugins, such as MailButler, MailTags, etc. I had MailButler and MailTags installed on my Mail.app program with Exchange and it caused nothing but problems – missing mail messages, crashes, hanging, etc. I uninstalled it, and Mail.app worked fine again with Exchange.

Good Luck.

6

Thanks. The problem is that MailHub, in particular, is the very functionality that I want to retain. The lack of that feature, being able to automatically file sent messages (in particular) and even received messages is the very thing which makes the pain of learning Outlook not worth it.

From Randy Singer on the Macs In Law Offices google group, I tried this which seems to have fixed the problem for the time being; Go to:

~/Mail/V5/MailData and delete all files the name of which start with “Envelope” – there are 5 different ones.