Windows Mail app does nothing when clicked, how do you fix it?

Windows 10 Mail App stops responding and probably Calendar and People apps as well. When you click on the app nothing happens. You go to settings to see if you can uninstall. You will find there is no uninstall for this. It is part of the operating system and you cannot uninstall it.

This happened on my Windows 10 Pro on my Toshiba Satellite S70 series as well as Toshiba's Windows tablet running Windows 10.

What now?

You can run the following (System File Checker) on the command-line with elevated permissions. It will try to verify and fix problems with files (http://hodentekhelp.blogspot.com/2015/05/how-to-run-system-file-checkersfc.html).

However, this did not solve the problem on both the devices.

Next following this thread I launched Windows PowerShell with elevated permissions and ran the following statement:

Get-appxprovisionedpackage –online | where-object {$_.packagename –like "*windowscommunicationsapps*"}
| remove-appxprovisionedpackage –online
Here is the screen shot of this run:

MailAppProblem

This fixed the problem on my laptop, but the Tablet is still having the same problem- non-responsive mail app.

Just before I ran the PowerShell application I had noticed that there was a new Windows Update and the Windows 10 build was 10586.

My tablet still had the build 10240 which I am upgrading to 10586. Let me see if this fixes the problem. Since these are Windows 10 programs, Microsoft should make sure they work all the time as most users may not even know what powershell is not to speak of elevated permissions, sfc etc.

How to run the System File Checker(SFC) program?

After using the computer you may reach a situation that something or the other not working, perhaps it is the browser, perhaps it is some device on your computer. The reason could be corruption of the system files.

This can be fixed using the SYSTEM FILE CHECKER program on your computer. It is located as shown
in the next image.

 

This program requires elevated permissions and should be run by the administrator.

This is a two-step process:
1st Step: Start Command window with administrative privileges. The second step [running SYSTEM FILES CHECKER (sfc )] cannot be run if you are not the administrator of the computer.
Close all open programs
Click on Windows Icon at bottom left extreme and this will bring up a window on top of it as shown. In the place which says ‘Search Programs and files’ type-in cmd as shown.

 

 After you type-in you should see that search brings up the following: (notice the cmd at the very top)

 

 

2.  Go to the very top. Place your mouse on cmd but do not click. Now right click on cmd and a menu opens up as shown.
 

Click on ‘Run as administrator’
The above window goes away and your display goes dark and a small window asking ‘Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer’ is displayed. In the bottom there is a ‘Yes’ and a ‘No’.
3. Click Yes. The screen becomes visible and you will see the following window. In my case it is white and in yours probably black with white letters:
 

You should see ‘Administrator’ at the very top as shown in the above.

This is the window that allows you to make changes to your computer.

Step 2: Running the SFC program that fixes system files.
Type in as shown: Spelling is important. After typing in sfc leave a space and then type the rest.
 

After typing in as shown hit ENTER on your key board.
The process may take some time. You should see the progress as shown:
 

Note: I did not have any serious problems, but to show you the steps I ran this program. It does take quite a bit of time as it goes through the whole system.
However the program cleaned up my files:

 

 

You can check the log file at the above indicated location.