You can easily find and install plugins for Apple Mail, little extras that add new functions to it. What you can't do so easily is uninstall them. There's no section in Mail/Preferences where you can untick something, for instance, and no Plugins pane in System Preferences. All of which becomes a right pain when the plugin goes wrong.
And they will go wrong. Plugins are effectively workarounds, where a developer adds some new features to Mail that Apple hasn't done, but it's not as if Apple is hanging about. OS X updates regularly include revisions to Mail, and whether they're big enough that whether we can visibly see a difference or not, the odds are that they will break any plugin you've got. When that happens, this is what you get on starting Mail:
If you're like us, you leave it for now, intending to do something about it later. Also if you're like us, we were trying out Daylite, and have also intended to do something about that app later. We get a similar problem with OmniFocus, but there the app comes with its own instructions on how to update to a new version of the plugin. Come to think of it, we put that off a lot too.
Yet the day does finally come when we've had enough of the warning message on the way into Mail, and most definitely we've had enough of the delay it adds. Plus, every time you get this message and have to wait for it to go away, it remains on screen even after you've clicked OK, and it is always on top of whatever it is you were trying to do. Then Mail finishes opening, the message goes away, and you've forgotten what you were doing.
Update or remove
We're picking on Daylite here because it's the straw, and we're the camels with injured backs, but this Pointers applies to any plugin you ever use for Mail. Which means the answer to getting rid of that message is always one of two things: update it or get rid of it.
This Pointers is about getting rid of it. No software we've used makes updating this part easy: they're all great on updating their main app, but you're often left having to Google solutions to updating the mail plugin. This definitely applies to Daylite: we can't now see how we ever installed its Mail plugin, as there is no way to update it, no section we can find, no button we can press. Daylite is also very poor at uninstalling: you can't do it without following a series of instructions on the website about deleting specific hidden files from your Mac. What you really want is an uninstall button; you never want to poke about with invisible files.
Poke about with invisible files
Unfortunately, that's what you've got to do in order to remove any Mail plugin. It's not actually that complex, it's just tedious, and there is one big stumbling block that you are likely to trip over if you don't happen to spend your life in the hidden Library folders.
Folders. Plural. That's the problem. Your Mail plugin may be in one of the other two Library folders, and the difference between them is a tilde. Quit Mail, quit Daylite, or any other app whose plugin you want to remove, then in the Finder choose the Go menu, and the "Go to Folder ..." option.
In the box that appears, type ~/Library/Mail/ and press return. (The ~ character is on your keyboard next to the left shift key in the UK, and up just above the tab key in the US. You've never even noticed it.) This opens up a folder that looks like any other, except it is hidden so you couldn't have got to it any other way.
Look for a folder called Disabled Bundles, and if you find it, delete it. Look for a different folder called just Bundles, and open that: you may find files with names like DayliteMailAssistant.mailbundle. Delete.
We don't sound hugely confident there: we said if, and we said may. That's because of this issue that can trip you up -- and it did trip us up. You go to this Library, you find those Bundles folders, and there's no sign of the plugin that's making you pull your hair out. You start pushing hair back in, just so you've got more to pull out.
The reason is that there is this other Library folder. Use the Finder's Go/Go to Folder option again, and this time type /Library/Mail/ into the box that appears. That's exactly the same thing as before, minus the tilde ~ at the start. It takes you to another Library folder, where you look for the Disabled Bundles to delete, and you look in the Bundles for ones with the name of the application you're now so fed up with.
Delete those, and the plugin is gone forever. Now restart Mail, and you're done.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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