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Mail - how to reset/repair one user

GH1852

GH1852

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 14, 2015
32
15
Near Chicago
A friend using MacOS 12.7.1 is having problems with Mail. Mail works quite well as long as they don't activate their IMAP account; they have some local mailboxes from an old POP account. Connecting and trying to synchronize with their one IMAP account causes Mail to increase its memory usage (in Activity Monitor) until it's about 15 GB, and the system notifies the user that they're out of application memory. The system has 16 GB of RAM.

Connecting to the same IMAP account with Thunderbird proceeded without any problems for the user.

I also set up a brand new user account and then used Monterey Mail to access the same IMAP account. While synchronizing, total memory usage for Mail was roughly 100 MB and stable.

So I think I eliminated the account's IMAP server, and macOS Monterey Mail for a different user. But now I'm trying to find reliable information on how to deal with whatever may be wrong with their preferences/indexes/caches etc etc. I'd like to reset to "factory stock". I have no problems with exporting their local mail boxes to .mbox if necessary. I don't want to lose messages. I've found quite a few guides that unfortunately are considerably older than Monterey
 
GH1852

GH1852

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 14, 2015
32
15
Near Chicago
bogdanw said:
Get AppCleaner https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ drag Mail into it and it will search for related folders and files. You can choose what to delete or click the magnifying glass at the end of each one and it will open in Finder.
Click to expand...
Thank you. That’s not something I had considered for a piece of MacOS, but I see your point. The user already has it installed. There was a time when resetting Mail involved moving perhaps 5 items to the Desktop. Current discussions seem to have people having the most impact from deleting 3 envelope index files
 
GH1852

GH1852

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 14, 2015
32
15
Near Chicago
bogdanw said:
Get AppCleaner https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ drag Mail into it and it will search for related folders and files. You can choose what to delete or click the magnifying glass at the end of each one and it will open in Finder.
Click to expand...
Sorry to say, AppCleaner refuses to even consider letting me look at files and folders that are associated with Mail, as it's a System Application. I'm not trying to uninstall it, but no luck. I've disabled SIP, and I attempted to mount the signed system volume as read/write. That was refused. Disabling SIP didn't do the trick. So worth trying, but probably not going to work.

Thanks for the prompt response.
 
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