All alliteration aside, there are a couple key problems that may originate in Mail on your Mac and cause your email experience to hit a wall. If you’re able to resolve these Mail maladies on your own, you can return to your regularly scheduled computing without having to call for help.

(Coincidentally, this is my second post about Mail featuring alliterative titles.)

Storage Shortage

If you use Mail, you might not guess that this application could be a culprit if your Mac is repeatedly running out of storage. Mail has the ability to help troubleshoot nonworking email server connections. However, the underlying feature does not play nicely with some servers.

At some point, if Mail fails to connect to your mail server, it may invite you to enable Connection Logging. I don’t know anyone who has the wisdom to interpret Mail connection logs to identify the cause of this nor would ever need to, but the antiquated feature remains in Mail.

Unfortunately, if you have a Google or AOL account and accept the invitation, these accounts commonly fail to clean up the logs they generate. This results in files ballooning to extremely large sizes — even tens of gigabytes and sometimes over a hundred — and may lead a Mac to run out of storage.

Disable Mail Connection Logging

The quickest way to know if Connection Logging is enabled is to look at the title bar of your Mail window. Does it say, “Connection Logging Enabled”? To resolve:

  1. In Mail, go to the Window menu and choose Connection Doctor, as shown above
  2. Is Log Connection Activity checked? If so, uncheck the box.
  3. Click Show Logs and a Finder window should open showing one or more text files (if no window appears, there aren’t any logs)
  4. For reference, view the window as a List so you can see the sizes of the files and know how much storage you’ll recover (or, you can select the files and get info on the group for their total size)
  5. Select all the files, move them to the trash, and empty the trash

Search Stoppage

Have you ever tried to search your email and found that Mail fails to suggest any matching people, subjects, or attachments, or presents no results at all?

Suggestions usually appear in a menu below the search field while typing a query. As long as you don’t press Return, they remain on the screen for you to choose.

However, sometimes the menu and/or message list is empty and it’s not because there are no matches. Rather, the database file that stores an index of all your email data may be corrupt and need to be rebuilt.

Rebuild Mail Index

To do so, you can delete the file and Mail will make a new one. Here’s how:

  1. Quit Mail
  2. Click on the Finder
  3. Click the Go menu (on the menu bar between View and Window), hold the Option key, and choose Library
  4. Navigate to a folder in Library called Mail
  5. Inside Mail, open a folder whose name is “V” followed by a number. If there’s more than one, pick the highest number.
  6. Then, open MailData, select any files whose name begins with “Envelope Index,” and move them to the trash
  7. Open Mail and it will invite you to import your email as if for the first time. Be patient while it reviews all of the messages in your archive, redownloads from the server as needed, and builds a new index.

This support article from C-Command Software outlines the whole process. After it completes (or sometime soon), try searching and see if suggestions and results pop up. (If not, reach out to me for additional guidance.)

Have you faced either of these issues? How much storage did you recover by deleting your Mail connection logs? How long were you without the ability to search your email?

Sound off in the comments below…