I’ve been bothered with this issue for several times. I can’t shut down my Mac because of Mail, an app I use daily.
Learn more about Private Email account setup in Mail on macOS Sierra/Mojave (SMTP/IMAP). Find your answers at Namecheap Knowledge Base. To locate the folder where Mac OS X Mail version 1 stores mail: Open a new Finder window. Go to your home directory by using the Home toolbar button or by selecting Go Home from the menu bar. In this version of the Mail app there's no more checkbox for saving drafts on the server, but you can manually select where Mail stores your drafts for you. As before, go to Settings Mailbox settings and in the Drafts drop-down menu select either Gmail/Drafts or On my mac/Drafts. In Mac Mail there is a setting for this. Go to Mail, Preferences, Accounts. Choose your account. Then under Mailbox Behaviors there is a setting for Drafts Mailbox. You can switch it to “On My Mac / Drafts” and those drafts will be stored locally. Or, you can leave it as the Gmail Drafts mailbox.
It seems Mail won’t quit and it shows me this error message:
I remember I quit the Apple Mail app, but somehow it just failed…weird!
Macos App Download
After attempting to research the reasons why, I also bumped into a few forum discussions where other Mac users were also experiencing the same issue.
And to my surprise, we can’t figure out the exact reasons. Some say it’s related to the OS X (now macOS) your Mac is running under, while there are also people say it’s due to the Mail app itself — meaning it’s a bug that needs to be fixed.
Personally, I feel the later sounds more reasonable. Because I’ve encountered a few other issues related to Mail, such as the app takes longer to receive and send out new mails. Especially when I send an email, sometimes it just freezes on the “sending” process, I often have to double check the sendbox to make sure my email reply is delivered successfully. Apple already knows this issue as you can see from this support article.
Another case, which is more recent — the Mail app has some problems after iPhone and iPad users updated to iOS 11. Apple and Microsoft ware working together to fix the problems, as you can read more from this MacRumor report.
Anyways, the solution to fix that Mail failing to quit error is also simple.
Simply click the Apple logo on the top left corner, then select Force Quit, highlight the Mail app, and confirm the operation. After that, your Mac should be able to shut down properly.
Another way to do this is open Activity Monitor (do a quick Spotlight search? to open the app), then select the Mail related process and quit it.
You can choose either way to get that done.
That’s for this update, I hope you find it useful. And hopefully Apple Mail team would improve the app and make it more smooth to use 🙂
Apple Mail on OS X has a peculiar way of working with the drafts folder, and so does Gmail, and the two don’t mix well. Apple Mail automatically saves a copy of a message that you’re working on every 30 seconds in the Drafts folder, and then tells the server to remove the previous version from the Drafts folder.
The problem is when Gmail receives the instruction to remove the previous version of a message in its Drafts folder, it automatically moves that previous message to its Trash. The result is that your Trash immediately fills with many, many iterations of the same message.
If you designate a folder other than the [Gmail]/Drafts folder for Drafts in Apple Mail, this doesn’t happen, but the results are arguably worse, which is that when the partial draft message is removed from the folder by Apple Mail, it hangs out in the Gmail All Mail folder forevermore (which you might normally never see, but this could be a nuisance if you need to go searching for it).
So I simply don’t save my Drafts messages folder to server when the server is Gmail or Google Apps. I disable that setting in the account preferences in Mail. I don’t get my drafts synchronized to other devices, but I can live with that. I leave the [Gmail]/Drafts folder visible so if I have any half-composed messages I wrote on the Gmail web, I can still see them in Apple Mail.
Macos Mail Location
But if you really want synchronized Drafts, and you want the folder to behave correctly, you can go to your Gmail settings and under “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”, turn Auto-Expunge Off, and in the following section choose “Immediately Delete The Message Forever”. If you choose this setting, you must turn off Archive Messages on any iOS devices (see my previous post on this) or you will lose a message forever when you tap the Archive icon.
