Crash Caused by Apple Mail’s Previous Recipients Window and Editing in Contacts
Late last year, a TidBITS reader alerted me to a reproducible bug in Contacts in macOS 14 Sonoma, and after I wrote about it in “How to Recover from Contacts Freezing when Printing Lists in Sonoma” (6 December 2023), Apple fixed the bug in macOS 14.3. Let’s see if we can get Apple to stamp out another crashing bug associated with Contacts and Mail.
This bug, reported in TidBITS Talk by Will_B, is unusual because it requires coordinated activity in two of Apple’s apps, Mail and Contacts. To reproduce it, choose Window > Previous Recipients in Mail. Then, in Contacts, add a contact or edit a field in an existing contact. When you click the Done button in Contacts, Mail will crash. Although I haven’t seen any ill effects from those crashes, there’s no telling what sort of corruption could occur depending on what Mail is doing at the moment of the crash.
It doesn’t matter if you leave the Previous Recipients window open or close it, nor does it make any difference if Mail launches before or after Contacts. The location of the edited contact is irrelevant; I’ve seen crashes with contacts in both iCloud and Google. Time is not a factor either, ensuring that users could experience Mail crashes days after opening and closing the Previous Recipients window. Interestingly, editing a contact in Cardhop also triggers the crash, but Seth Anderson reported in TidBITS Talk that BusyContacts does not cause a crash.
Will_B said he could reproduce the crash in macOS 12 Monterey and the beta of macOS 15 Sequoia, and others confirmed that it happens in macOS 13 Ventura and macOS 14 Sonoma as well. Several people said it did not occur in macOS 11 Big Sur, but it’s clearly a longstanding bug. A number of us have reported the bug to Apple.
These crashes may not be all that common. I suspect most people seldom interact with the Previous Recipients window. It’s an internal contact list that Mail maintains to help suggest or autocomplete addresses when you’re composing messages. The main reason to open the Previous Recipients window is if Mail suggests an obsolete or incorrect address for someone—to get it to stop, you need to remove that address from Previous Recipients. Of course, if you use the Add to Contacts button to add an item to Contacts and switch to Contacts to flesh out that contact, you’ll crash Mail.
For now, you can prevent Mail from crashing unexpectedly by quitting and relaunching the app after you work in the Previous Recipients window. Otherwise, your next edit in Contacts will unceremoniously cause Mail to trip over its code.
As others have reported, this is triggered in the Public Beta of Mac OS 15 (and again, is not triggered with BusyContacts syncing to iCloud in Sequoia nor Ventura.) I do have a Mac running Mojave, and the bug is not there, or at least I cannot get Mail to crash.
This is very timely, as I’m going to help a client with a Previous Recipients problem later this week. Thank you!
I’m running Sonoma 14.5 on a MacBook Pro. Having looked at Previous Recipients (without editing it) and then closing it, I opened Contacts. Deleted a few old ones – without any fuss by Mail – then entered a note on one Contact, which caused Mail to promptly crash.
Curious. I believe at least a couple others besides myself have filed Feedback reports on this. Has anyone’s Feedback “Recent Similar Reports:” been incremented to show that others have reported this? Mine has not. I do not believe I have ever had a report incremented, though many reports I’ve made have been noticed by others (the local Cal/Contacts syncing among others).
I concur with Seth, this bug is not replicated when making an edit in BusyContacts.
You can add one more user to the long list of folks who’ve experienced, reproduced, documented and notified Apple about this bug - going on years now. The bug also occurs editing a contact with an open email being edited to that same contact, although this appears to be intermittent. We also routinely delete Recent Contacts just to try and cut down on the mishaps.
Yes, deleting a contact won’t trigger the bug. You need to click the Done button that comes up whenever you’re editing a contact (which is part of adding one).
To answer my question, Apple actually incremented the “Recent Similar Reports” to “Less than 10.”
I’m seeing that too, and more promisingly, I forwarded to a friend who said he could get it in front of the right team at Apple. Fingers crossed!
Not exactly surprising given how bad Contacts in particular “works” these days, but I had not seen it before myself, but also sent in a crash report. I have several reproducible bugs in Contacts that Apple won’t do anything about – is there even anyone reading reports from Feedback Assistant these days? Last time someone noted they had read a bug report was in Mountain Lion for me – maybe I am blacklisted as I find too many problems.
If you have reproducible bugs, particularly crashes, in Contacts, start a new topic here so the rest of us can double-check and avoid them in the future, and if they’re appropriate, I’ll do an article.
Hi Adam,
There is of course a chance some of the problems I have encountered are due to my contacts database having some problem and have not taken the time to try and rebuild it in maybe a new user account, but will see if I get some spare time and write about it. Most annoying lately are the spinning beach ball after searching for a contact and trying to copy some information from a card (only happen like 50% of the time …).
Otherwise most annoyed what happens when trying to open and edit contacts from Mail … two consistent inconsistencies arise … .
All the best,
Jerry (via iPhone)