Fix MsgFiler 4’s Random Quitting on macOS

A MsgFiler user pointed me to a possible fix for the random quitting phenomenon that some users have been experiencing. As I mentioned in my original post, I had not been seeing this. It has been very difficult for me to reproduce the problem on my machines. Several people have been testing this solution, and it seems to be working.

Automatic termination on macOS

Automation termination of inactive apps has been a part of macOS since OS X Lion. The feature originated on iOS. It was designed to free up computing resources on the memory-constrained, portable devices. For many users, this can be a good thing, as users don’t have to fuss around with quitting unused applications. MsgFiler, on the other hand, relies on being available at the press of its keyboard shortcut when in Mail. So, we don’t want macOS to quit it whenever it goes inactive.

Here are some more links I came across when investigating this problem:

• Automatic Application Termination & Servers
• How to prevent zombies
• App Nap, Automatic Termination, and Zombie Apps
• disableAutomaticTermination documentation
• MacOs automatically quits unused apps (non-Apple apps only?)

Here are two ways to disable automatic termination of apps on macOS. The first targets just MsgFiler 4. The second method shows you how to disable it for all applications on your Mac.

Disabling automation termination of MsgFiler 4

1. Open Terminal.
2. Type the following command and press Return:
   
   defaults write com.atow.MsgFiler4 NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool yes
   
3. Restart your computer for the changes to take effect.

The command above will just target the MsgFiler 4 application and prevent it from being automatically terminated by macOS.

Disabling automation termination of all apps

To disable Automatic Termination of all apps on macOS, follow these steps:

1. Open Terminal.
2. Type the following command and press Return.
   
   defaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool yes
   
3. Restart your computer for the changes to take effect.

Try it out and report back

For reasons I still don’t fully understand, it seems that some users’ machines are configured in a way that causes MsgFiler 4 to be affected by the automatic termination policy. Others, like myself, have not encountered this issue. I have been developing MsgFiler 4 on a 14” M2 Max MacBook Pro without migrating any data from a previous Mac. I would expect automatic termination to be enabled by default, but I have not experienced the bug so far. I would be interested in hearing from users whose machines were affected, particularly whether they had migrated data from a previous macOS installation or if their machine was newly configured out of the box.

If you’ve been experiencing the issue where MsgFiler 4 randomly quits throughout the day, try one of the two methods mentioned above. Let us know in the comments below if this has permanently resolved the problem for you!