Lion Mail, 1 minute to shut down, "removing message attachments"

[katewes]

After a clean install of Lion, everything is fine, except Apple Lion Mail takes often 1 minute to shut down while the activity panel states "Removing message attachment". This happens each time, even when there have been no new incoming emails with attachments.

Any ideas why this "Removing message attachment" and 1 minute shutdown is occurring.

Could this problem be because, when I copied the Mail folder from Snow Leopard, I also copied the Mail Downloads folder?

I use Lion Mail with Gmail IMAP.

As background, when exporting emails from Snow Leopard to Lion, I copied the Mail, and Mail Downloads folders, and the preference file. These emails in Snow Leopard were smooth as silk.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

It sounds to me that Mail is simply confused - either its internal SQLite database has bad entries in it, which isn't that hard to correct, or the Mail Downloads folder content has gotten out of sync with what Mail thinks should be in there (try the first solution before attempting to fix this).

 

[katewes]

It sounds to me that Mail is simply confused - either its internal SQLite database has bad entries in it, which isn't that hard to correct, or the Mail Downloads folder content has gotten out of sync with what Mail thinks should be in there (try the first solution before attempting to fix this).

Before taking the above steps, I backed up the Mail folder.

Then I tried the rebuilt step by deleting the "Envelope Index" file. The first attempt at a rebuilt resulted in an error message. The second attempt at a rebuilt resulted in Apple Mail not being able to connect to Gmail IMAP.

So I deleted the Mail file, and restored the earlier Mail file.

Then I deleted the Mail Attachments folder - and that has solved the slow shutdown problem. When the activity monitor is inactive, Mail now shuts down swiftly.

So the problem was because, when I copied the Mail folder and preference file -- as per the instructions on online articles -- I took it upon myself to also copy the Mail Attachments folder (which none of the articles told me to do). So deletion of that folder brought it back to normal.

Mail is still slower to start up compared to Snow Leopard, but it is ok.