Q I’ve received an obvious scam email. My usual procedure is to consign these to the Junk folder. However, when I click on the email to do this, or delete it, I get the spinning beachball, then Mail locks up, forcing me to Force Quit the application. What other options are there to delete an email when the obvious one doesn’t work?

A There are three possible problems which could be causing this.

First, the message is malformed and causing problems with Mail, perhaps deliberately. One way to work around this is to select another (or no) message, then hover the pointer over the offending message and Control-click to bring up the contextual menu. The offending message should be highlighted but not displayed in the message viewer, and you can then select the Delete command and be rid of it.

Second, your Mailbox may be wobbly. If you still cannot delete the message, then try selecting the mailbox it is in, and rebuilding it using the Rebuild command. Sometimes it can help if you can access the message using an iPad or iPhone, which can then sort the problem out for you.

Third, the message could be stuck in the server. Some messages, I suspect deliberately crafted to do this, just seem to break the email system. If this is coming via Apple’s iCloud mail, the only people who can sort that for you are Apple’s iCloud support team, via this page.

There are sporadic reports of deliberate crafting of messages to cause security problems with iOS or Android, something you should be sensitive to even though it currently appears most unlikely.