Mail applications not rendering content and semi-hanging

[milligna]

Hi All, first time poster! I have a strange problem happening recently on my M1 Macbook Air (Sonoma 14.2.1). I have multiple email clients - Outlook, Mail app, Canary - Intermittently I will launch one or all of these clients and when I try to view the content of an email, I get no content - I can see the subject and other metadata headers, but whatever content (presumably HTML content) is trying to render fails to do so. It's interesting that this affects multiple mail applications, so I presume that there's something common to whatever html renderer they make use of that is having the problem.

Another symptom that seems to often occur at the same time as this with the Mail app and Canary is that command-q will fail to quit the app (this isn't consistent but happens often enough).

A few things have changed recently that I suspect have occurred around the same time as this fault behan. I've installed a Citrix Workspace app for work and I've also started using a WavLink USB dock and external ultrawide display attached to that dock. The wavlink is a displaylink dock, but I don't believe I still have displaylink running by default.

Another issue I seem to be having which seems to have started around the same time is that random different apps will encounter a beachball freeze. This seems to happen when command-tabbing around the screen.

Looking at activity monitor I can see that windowserver is often taking the most CPU, but I don't know if this was normal behaviour - I don't have a historical view on this. A reboot usually fixes this issue, but I'm not sure what's triggering it. It's very odd.

Any thoughts on where I might start looking to troubleshoot this?

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Sorry for the delayed response.

At first glance, it may have something to do with the Citrix Workspace application, since you mentioned the issue may have started around the time it was installed. I doubt the WavLink Dock or display could cause the mail issue.

To troubleshoot, you could try disconnecting the WavLink Dock and using the MacBook Air's built-in display with nothing else connected. If the issue persists, then maybe try uninstalling the Citrix software if you can?

Also, I have seen issue with email displaying remote images and such when the macOS firewall is active, folks have McAfee, MacKeeper, antivirus, and other Internet-related utilities running, especially with real-time scanning/monitoring running.

See if any of that helps,

C