I recently ran into an interesting issue, with Apple Mail seeming to randomly crash.
While browsing Apple Mail and selecting certain e-mails, Apple Mail would ‘Unexpectedly Quit’. The mail messages that would cause these quits were seemingly random. None were from the same contact, they had no shared elements (attachments, subject line, invalid characters, etc.), there was nothing that would help to distinguish the cause of these crashes.
The only element that seemed to line up, was that there each had multiple recipients in the To: field, perhaps indicting a corrupted recipients file. To test this, I tried to open and review the previous recipients.
On selecting previous recipients, mail would become non-responsive and hang indefinitely. This appeared to indicate the cause of the unexpected quit was a corrupted MailRecents-V4.abcdmr.
This was fixed with the following steps:
- Close out of Mail
- Open Finder,
- From the Go menu, select Go To Folder… and paste in the following: ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/
- When the window opens, select the MailRecents-V4.abcdmr and and rename it to “OldMailRecents-V4.abcdmr”
- Reopen Mail, and breathe a sigh of relief.
That’s it!
Note: The above steps will erase your autocomplete for previous recipients. If you have a backup of your MailRecents-V4.abcdmr through Time Machine or Crashplan, restore that file (from a point prior to the date you started experiencing the issue) to the above Library path and complete the rest of the above steps.
