Office 365 Mac Mail problems and how to completely clear Mac Mail

[timeshifter]

One of my long time client's uses Office 365 (Exchange) for mail and prefers Mac Mail. Been mostly OK for a long time, and he's stuck on Mac Mail because he's addicted to Mail Butler. Anyway, recently his Mac has been having trouble getting new mail to the Inbox. Once I've rebuilt the Inbox and I think it may have helped for a while. Now it's acting up again.

His Inbox is about 3.62GB. Not sure exactly how many messages, but they date all the way back to 2015. My thought is is that the Inbox is too enormous for Mail to deal with effectively.

My plan is two fold. One is to clean up his Inbox on Outlook webmail or real Outlook on a PC. I've told him to leave Mac Mail off for now. After that's done I want to start over with Mail on his system. That will involve disabling the account. But I want to make sure that the mailbox is really fresh.

Is the way to do that is to delete everything under ~/Library/Mail/V7 ? Any other suggestions?

 

[timeshifter]

So I got all 50,386 messages downloaded in his Inbox downloaded to a high powered PC running the latest Outlook. I've created folders for each year and have moved 2016 (7,677 messages) and 2017 (10,045 messages) into their own folders.

At first I just did a month's worth of 2017 messages. It seemed to take a long time for the Outlook web app to have them all. A really long time.

Next I did all of 2016 and of 2017.

I'm on a 200 / 20 Internet connection. I would think O365 would be smart enough to just move the messages. But it seems that it may be re-uploading them based on the time it takes.

Currently in the bottom of the screen it says "Updating 2017" and "Updating 2016". The properties for 2016 says

Last synchronized on: 4/30/2020 12:43 PM
Server folder contains: 1886 Item(s)
Offline folder contains: 7677 Item(s)

I went ahead and clicked Update Folder on the Send / Receive tab with the 2016 folder selected. The progress bar is moving VERY slowly, may be an hour or longer it appears.

I'd like to get the mail re-organized and all synced up before I reload it on his Mac.

Am I on the right track?

 

[Markverhyden]

Yes, you can delete everything in the V7 folder via finder. Personally I always make a backup and then move the contents. Then delete later once I'm sure everything is fine.

As far as the problem? I've mailboxes larger than 3.62. But I've had to rebuild as well. After all email programs are really just database programs. Occasionally db's do need maintenance. But cleaning up never hurts.

 

[timeshifter]

I think the mailbox is about 15GB actually. That 3.62 figure I think I got from Outlook when it was downloading only one years worth of mail.

Also, wonder if 50,000 is some kind of magical number. I recall other mail systems that break around 25,000 (Go Daddy IMAP). Maybe Mac Mail chokes at 50,000. Outlook said the Inbox had 50,386 messages.

 

[Markverhyden]

I don't think that's the issue. Just one of my accounts below. Indexing can cause issues with email. Doesn't matter whether it's Mail, Outlook or some other client as macOS indexes everything. Forcing Spotlight to rebuild sometimes works. But other times I've had to just create a new user profile.

 

[timeshifter]

What is that screenshot from? Mac Mail and Exchange? You don’t have one million messages in one inbox or folder do you?

Bigger question: how do you create a new profile on the Mac?

Easy on Windows. Just create a new mail profile for the current logged in user.

On the Mac I think the think to do is manually delete the V7 folder as discussed.

 

[Markverhyden]

That's Apple Mail. It's not 1 million in one folder. LOL!!! Spread out over some 150 folders, the largest being around 190k for one folder. By new profile I was referring to a new computer account. While Outlook on Mac has profiles, Outlook Profile Manager, Apple Mail doesn't as far as I know.