I had GrowlMail installed and after I switched to Safari4 Beta my Mail.app started bombing out complaining that the problem was GrowlMail. Whether it was or not doesn’t matter to me since I need my mail.
So since looking around the web didn’t help, I decided to poke around and see if I could find it myself. Turns out that it’s very simple to remove. So go remove the following folder(s):
- /Users/<username>/Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle
- /Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle (thanks to Hildgrim for pointing this out)
1. run the following in Terminal:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail EnableBundles -bool NO
2. and start Mail.app and then quit it.
3. now run the following in Terminal:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail EnableBundles -bool YES
4. and this time you can start Mail.app and leave it running.
I have no idea why I had to disable and then re-enable bundles in the preferences but just removing the GrowlMail bundle folder didn’t seem to fix the problem, but this did.
Anyway, hope it helped someone. Let me know if something went awry…
-erb
erbmicha (Michael Erb) // Feb 27, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Having trouble with Mail.app and GrowlMail? http://is.gd/l6Kf
did work great – thanks
Thanks a lot, buddy. Just what i needed. :)
Thanks alot!! you saved me much of my spare time!!
No need for the terminal surfing in my case, mail is running hot and strong after the folder deletion… Wondering why it would start after the safari 4 beta tho…
Thanks!!!!
legend, works a treat!
Running your fix did not work so I tried running the first fix again and Mail now seems stable. I hope I didn’t create other problems.
Thank you sooo much! I had the same issue due to Safari 4 beta. You ROCK!
Thanks, I just ran into this problem and had no idea how to solve it, so thanks Google and thank you :-)
Thanks!
CRAMPT (Christopher) // Mar 18, 2009 at 6:26 am
http://tinyurl.com/cpea8l … Got Mail working again… time for bed.
Thanks a lot! this seems to have fixed the issue. Hats off!
This was causing me problems too, and so this solution was very helpful. Thanks Much!
Thank you. That worked perfectly.
if it’s uninstalled it shouldn’t be showing up in preferences anymore, right? it’s still there in my preferences… can someone help me?
azul – Growl will still be in your preferences. All we are doing is removing the GrowlMail bundle from Mail.app. If you want to uninstall Growl, just option+right-click the Growl icon in the System Preferences window and select ‘Remove “Growl” Preference Pane’.
Thanks Michael, your post is muchly appreciated.
Thanks so much. You saved my ass with that post.
Thanks – worked wonders for me.
Didn’t work for me but just ‘defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles -bool NO’ and then ‘defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles -bool YES’ did it. ThanX!
Hooray! Thanks for the fix!
YES! thanks a lot!
I was thinking I was going crazy! Mail kept not only bombing, but more annoyingly it was slowing my entire macbook pro to a crawl. This did the trick! Thanks.
Thanks… Worked like a charm. I found the bundles but didn’t know about the preference setting.
I just installed Snow Leopard and Growl mail stopped working sucks really bad because it was nice but your post was just what I needed to remove it thank you
Happy to help Nicholas. The weird thing is that when I installed Snow Leopard, it actually disabled GrowlMail for me automatically. Weird…
Hey, thanks for figuring this out. More importantly, thanks for posting the fix in such a clear and concise manner. Keep up the good work, citizen!
Thanks man!
Note that the Bundles can be found both in /~/Libraries and /Libraries at the same time, so be sure to look at both places if you don’t find the GrowMail bundle at first.
Nice pickup! Forgot about that. Editing now…
Thanks a bunch Michael! Mail is stable again!
jbarratt (Josh Barratt) // Sep 16, 2009 at 12:29 am
Got tired of getting popups about GrowlMail after Snow Leopard upgrade. This googled-for technique did me just fine: http://is.gd/l6Kf
That was a big help… that second bundle in the Library was what kept tripping me up before. Thanks!
Thx!!!!
No one can pay me back the hours I lost trying to get rid of it!!!!
Thx again!!!
Great post…
I’m hoping this fixes my issue with mail freezing in snow leopard…
Thanks for taking the time.
First, a big thanks. It worked like a champ. Second, I’d like to mention a big flaw in GrowlMail that everyone should think about. It ignores your load/don’t load image settings in mail, meaning that it confirms your email address and ip address to every spammer and targeted advertiser on the planet. Not Good. Thank goodness for Little Snitch. I had GrowlMail running for about 20 minutes before I started frantically trying to figure out how to get it completely off of my system.
Thanks so much. Worked great on 10.6.x!
Worked perfectly. Many thanks!
Worked for me – thanks!
thanks guy!
Thanks a lot! Good and simple solution. Did help me without restarting mail bundles
Thanks for the trick !
I was never happy with the way Growl interfaced with my gmail account. I would get “new messages” badges whenever I was composing a message for too long or when I had sent it. Anyway, it was worse when I went to snow leopard, so I tried to uninstall it. Even worse, I got an error message whenever I started mail.
So, the opening error message was gone just after removing:
/Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle
The other file was already gone. I went ahead and ran the terminal commands, but I’m not sure whether it was necessary in my situation or not.
As an aside, the way the page is formatted on my screen splits the terminal commands before the
-boolargument. Maybe you could reduce the font size so it all fits on one line?Note that the
comment tagshrank the font, so maybe that is all that you’ll need to do?Thanks for the tip.
As I gather kkingnia said, running the second command line “enable Bundles YES” seemed to bring me back to the start of my problem, so just running the first script Mail.app seems to working fine.
thanks it works for me with deleting the folder, but no need to do the terminal script.
Thanks for this. Glad I could get rid of this annoying Growl thing, never installing it again, piece of crap software thats been bugging me ever since I installed it.
you saved my mail.app!! Thank you!!
Snow Leopard excitedly came out-of-the-box with support for Cisco IPsec VPN which is what a lot of companies use.
The problem came when I tried to connect to the VPN at work. We were using the Cisco VPN client before but it was a nightmare to keep working all the time and the lack of any [...]
Thanks. Deleting folders worked for me. I didnt need to write anything on the terminal.
If you re-download the GrowlMail dmg from growl.info there is an uninstall script in it.
Thanks so much. Nothing else worked but this worked like a charm
THANKS SO MUCH!!! This really helped
coffeephoenix (Arjun Bansal) // Dec 12, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Finally fixed growlmail warning that was slowing Mail startup: loving it http://erbmicha.com/2009/02/27/uninstall-growlmail-on-leopard/