[artlewis]

My wife's Mail account started freezing today.
It opens and then the beach ball starts. I can see the e/m she got on Friday (both opened and unopened), but there's no way to access any of the mail.
Mail won't force quit and, when that effort times out, I'm asked if I want to force quit (again) and report the problem to Apple. I agree to both and Mail shuts down.
After going through that process 3 times, I searched on line, without much by way of results.
Disk Utility repair permissions (twice), with no luck. DiskWarrior - rebuild desktop and check files (also twice) only told me that there was a damages Property List file. An unrepairable, corrupted "com.apple.applestore.plist" is identified.
After looking on line (Apple and ManNN), I see posts about another file "com.apple.mail.plist", but that file isn't in her preferences folder. It is also not in the preferences flyer of her 2 week old back-up on an external drive.
Any suggestions?
Thanks,

[angelmb]

Are you running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.? If so, the preferences for Mail are not located where they used to be for previous releases of OS X.

I think you have to go to Library>Containers. You should see a 'com.apple.mail' folder in there.

You might want to delete* the entire folder and launch Mail afterwards. This should create a new 'com.apple.mail' folder and get Mail function properly again.

* Please note: I am running Lion here, so I have no first-hand information regarding on the com.apple.mail folder content. I would copy that folder to the desktop or any other safe location, should you need it.

[BWilliams]

I don't know if this will be any use to you but it might be worth checking out. Go to the how to section on this site:

Scannerz, FSE, and SpotOff with Spot-O-Meter by SCSC

and see if their article on using Activity Monitor to troubleshoot ML performance problems is of any use to you. Another thing you might want to try is this:

1. Open up the console.
2. Start Mail.app
3. See what errors (if any) it's tossing out.

If you see disk I/O errors then you might want to test your drive with something like Scannerz. Disk Utility and Disk Warrior can be used to fix index problems and other stuff like that but they don't do surface scan or hardware related tests.

I'd be 50 bucks something will show up in Activity Monitor or in the console when Mail messes up.

Good luck.

[artlewis]

Thanks for your suggestions.
Once I upgraded her operating system to 10.8.4, the issue resolved.

[BWilliams]

I assumed you had done that when I wrote my post. However, I must say it doesn't surprise me. 10.8.2 was probably one of the buggiest OS releases I've seen in years. 10.8.3 cleared a fair amount of them up. 10.8.4 seems to have cleaned up even more...but I still see some bugs or at least annoyances.

I surely hope they do a better job prepping the OS for release with Mavericks than they did with ML. I read one report that said they only tested it for 2 weeks before release.