Mac Mail - Stuck "Moving Message 1 of 1" Exchange account bug

[commanderclif]

I'm running 27 public beta 2 and have been having an issue with it hanging on "Moving 1 Message of X"

It pretty much breaks the Mail program from being able to move anything to a folder / delete as nothing else will sync behind the stuck message the needs to finish moving. New emails come in, updates from other devices take effect.

I've narrowed it down to what I believe is the process of receiving a calendar invite and clicking the accept link in top right of the message. Whatever the process of adding it to the calendar, relaying to the sender your status, and deleting the message I believe if creating the hang. I've narrowed it down to the emails emlx that has "No Sender" and "No Subject". After emptying the spam and trash folders and trying to delete this EMLX file, when Mail reopens this email re-appears in the trash can and its EMLX file number changes.

When this happened last week I did the one fix I read online that involved deleting the Envelope files in the MailData folder. While this fixed the issue last week, it took Mail about 20 minutes to rebuild the databases for the email accounts AND THEN, hours to redownload all the emails to Mail. Maybe thats delete TOO MANY envelope files, just trying to hit the one that hanging on something not syncing properly without touching the two accounts that have no issues since this is just an Exchange account problem.

 

[benholt]

That "no sender / no subject" pattern is almost always the iMIP response Calendar generates after you accept the invite — Mail moves it to Trash internally, and if that delete fails once the emlx keeps re-materializing on Mail startup because Calendar keeps re-processing it.

Surgical fix that saved me from the full Envelope nuke: quit Mail, then in ~/Library/Mail/V10/<your Exchange UUID>/[Deleted Items].mbox/.../Data/Messages/ find the tiny .emlx (the empty ones are ~1 KB) and yank it. Then in Calendar > Settings > Advanced, uncheck "Automatically retrieve invitations from Mail". That stops the loop even if a file gets stuck again.

If it comes back, delete just that account's ExchangeSyncData folder rather than every Envelope index — Mail rebuilds only that account and you skip the multi-hour full resync.

 

[commanderclif]

That "no sender / no subject" pattern is almost always the iMIP response Calendar generates after you accept the invite — Mail moves it to Trash internally, and if that delete fails once the emlx keeps re-materializing on Mail startup because Calendar keeps re-processing it.

Surgical fix that saved me from the full Envelope nuke: quit Mail, then in ~/Library/Mail/V10/<your Exchange UUID>/[Deleted Items].mbox/.../Data/Messages/ find the tiny .emlx (the empty ones are ~1 KB) and yank it. Then in Calendar > Settings > Advanced, uncheck "Automatically retrieve invitations from Mail". That stops the loop even if a file gets stuck again.

If it comes back, delete just that account's ExchangeSyncData folder rather than every Envelope index — Mail rebuilds only that account and you skip the multi-hour full resync.

Thank you for this @benholt !

I'll try this out!

The follow up to what happened after my Monday comment. After trying different was to delete the EMLX file, I Ieft the MacBook Pro closed for about an hour and some how when I came back the Activity no longer showed trying to move the message. The No Sender/No subject email was still in the trash can and I’m glad to say that when I emptied the trash it DID go away and problem was gone.

I don't have the issue on iOS 27 public beta or my office Man on 26.5 so I"m trying to deal with calendar items on those two devices only till I can check it on the next Public beta to see if Apple gets its fixed by then. I did post on the Feedback Assistant.

 

[commanderclif]

THANK GOODNESS, this looks like it got fixed in the newest beta 5 (public beta 3).

 

[commanderclif]

That "no sender / no subject" pattern is almost always the iMIP response Calendar generates after you accept the invite — Mail moves it to Trash internally, and if that delete fails once the emlx keeps re-materializing on Mail startup because Calendar keeps re-processing it.

Surgical fix that saved me from the full Envelope nuke: quit Mail, then in ~/Library/Mail/V10/<your Exchange UUID>/[Deleted Items].mbox/.../Data/Messages/ find the tiny .emlx (the empty ones are ~1 KB) and yank it. Then in Calendar > Settings > Advanced, uncheck "Automatically retrieve invitations from Mail". That stops the loop even if a file gets stuck again.

If it comes back, delete just that account's ExchangeSyncData folder rather than every Envelope index — Mail rebuilds only that account and you skip the multi-hour full resync.

Hey @benholt so I thought this issue went away with the beta 5 (public beta 3) but dang it, it came back today. Odd that it didn't glitch last week and then the problem today. Trying your surgical fix, it didn't seem to take the first time. Going to try again but in Calendar app, I think that setting got changed to "Recognize event details"

 

[commanderclif]

Welp, not sure how or why this occurred but on a second, or maybe it was third attempt of moving the partial.emlx file to the trash can, I finally got a program restart where it wasn't saying "Moving 1 of 2" on startup. Persistence?! BUT now its saying its downloading X of 6,880 so seems something with mucking with just that one junk file ended up triggering it to redo the entire email account download. At least its not all 3 account but pain in the butt.

 

[commanderclif]

This is still an issue in Public Beta 5. I've found that when I track down the partial.emxl file, delete it with Mail not running, reopen Mail and then rebuild the trash the stuck message will reappear in trash, quit Mail, delete the recreated partial.emxl file and then reopening Mail I can get the “Moving Message” message to finally go away.