I had the opportunity to use Apple Mail from a hotel room that had a rather slow ethernet connection. When I went to quit Apple Mail, the application appeared to hang.
Under normal situations, I’d blame the server or the connection, perform a Force Quit by either right clicking the Mail icon or perhaps using Command-Option-Escape and blasting it that way, resorting to the good old Unix kill command if that didn’t work, followed by a reboot.
Turns out this isn’t necessary at all. Apple was smart enough to include a way to watch what mail is doing.
When Mail is up, select Window / Activity Viewer (also Command-Zero wll open it). I now run with this window open all the time.
When Mail shuts down, it tries to do so cleanly. This means that it sychronizes what’s on your system with what’s on the server. And, if you’re like me, you got a lot of folders sitting in your IMAP account. Sometimes a sychronization takes a while.
Seeing mail show you that it’s really trying to do something before it completes your Quit request invokes a good feeling that things are really busy for good reason, and not just hung.
Additionally, Apple has put big red stop buttons next to each of those tasks. You are more than welcome to click on them, telling the Mac to skip that step and do it later. This has helped me shutdown mail really quickly without screwing up my mailbox.
Violent shutdowns of mail can result in your local cache getting out of sync, giving the appearance that some messages don’t go with the right header.
If you are ever in doubt as to the integrity of your mailbox, Apple has thought of tweak for this too: Mailbox / Rebuild. Naturally, you’ll want the Activity Window open so you can watch as it downloads your mail again.
This was REALLY helpful. I’ve had tons of trouble thinking my mail hasn’t shut down. I now understand what’s happening.