Fix: Mail Interrupted Shut Down – Mac OS X

You may receive an error message when attempting to shut down your Mac OS X machine because Mac Mail is still running in the background. Even though you quit Mac Mail, it is still running as a process. Perform the following steps.

“Mail” interrupted shut down.

To continue shutting down, quit “Mail”.

1. Go to  -> Force Quit…

2. Select Mail and click Force Quit.

3. Other applications should close themselves and your Mac OS X machine should shut down.

Review Why Mac OS X Mail did not Quit

The next time you power on your Mac, check is there is anything revealing in the system logs.

1. Open Console in Applications -> Utilities

2. Go to /var/log folder in left pain. Search for that days system.log file.0.gz and then filter for mail events pictured below.

3. In this example, Mac Mail seems to have stalled quitting due to the following events.

Mail[685]: objc[685]: __weak variable at 0x618000315070 holds 0x9000000000 instead of 0x6180003a6120. This is probably incorrect use of objc_storeWeak() and objc_loadWeak(). Break on objc_weak_error to debug.

com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mail.6988[3627]): Service exited due to signal: Terminated: 15 sent by loginwindow[120]

ASL Module "com.apple.mail" claims selected messages.

Mail[685]: BUG in libdispatch client: kevent[EVFILT_MACHPORT] monitored resource vanished before the source cancel handler was invoked

4. Perform Mac Mail maintenance and rebuild your mailboxes.

5. Fix slow mail problems by rebuilding your Mac email store databases for email messages (Mac OS X 10.10)