Apple Email Hanging While Loading Mail

Iphone and Mac users. If you have issues loading (receiving) mail using the Apple Mail client, it might be related to where your default mail location is on our systems.

Those with older accounts on our systems might have an older setup for mail, which is that the mail server considers everything in your home directory to be a mail folder. It looks like your mail is actually in a mail subdirectory of your home directory. In some circumstances, however, a mail client might still try to list every possible mail folder, which means going through every file in your home directory. For those with large home directories, that can take a long time and make it appear that the mail client has hung up.

In particular, we noticed that some CS faculty had this sort of problem after an Apple update sometime toward the end of 2024. 

The best solution would be to tell the mail server that your mail is all located in your ~/mail directory (or whatever directory on our systems your mail folders reside), and nowhere else, as described on our Mail Folder Locations page.

The process for that would be, for you:

   Close any mail clients you have open, on your phone, laptop, or
   desktop.

   Look at the /.subscriptions file in your home directory. For every
   mailbox listed in that file:

       If the file is in ~/mail already, remove the "mail/" at the
       beginning of the filename in the .subscriptions file.

       If the file is in your home directory, move it into the ~/mail
       directory.

   Move your ~/.subscriptions file into the ~/mail directory.

   Create a ~/.mail_location file and put the directory mail into it
   on a single line.

   Start your mail client again and make sure everything works as
   expected.

If you run into problems, you can just remove the ~/.mail_location file