sdpate

Q: Mail under Mountain Lion is painfully slow / unusable

I started this on a separate list. Someone suggested posting to the ML group so here goes. Take a look at:

 

     https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4142266

 

To summarize again:

 

The upgrade to Mountain Lion went smoothly but Mail works really badly afterwards.

 

  • When sending an email, it takes a few minutes before the mail goes out. And that's with any size message.
  • Auto-completion of mail addresses while composing takes multiple minutes. Even after it finally comes up with a list of email addresses, pressing enter on one also takes minutes to acknowledge
  • At various times, hitting the mail icon on the dock has no effect. The same is true with Command+TAB

 

Overall, the unresponsiveness is painful and making me wish I hadn't upgraded

 

I use Mail for work as well as home. It's now making my work day completely useless as composing and sending a single email now takes about 5 minutes (regardless of the size of the email).

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Jul 27, 2012 8:47 AM

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Q: Mail under Mountain Lion is painfully slow / unusable

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  • by Stratman,

    Stratman Stratman Jul 30, 2012 10:54 AM in response to Confused of Sussex
    Level 1 (25 points)
    Jul 30, 2012 10:54 AM in response to Confused of Sussex

    Two things come to mind. First, have you turned off contacts in the iCloud systems preferences?

     

    Second, I think you can force delete something by moving it to the trash while holding down the option key.

     

    Good luck. I understand how frustrated you are. I was that way until I got this to work for myself.

  • by jerry2,

    jerry2 jerry2 Jul 30, 2012 6:56 PM in response to sdpate
    Level 1 (9 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jul 30, 2012 6:56 PM in response to sdpate

    yes, thanks sdpate.  I knew someone would figure it out.  It was driving me crazy to snowdog1.

  • by Ben Sutch,

    Ben Sutch Ben Sutch Jul 31, 2012 3:21 AM in response to sdpate
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 31, 2012 3:21 AM in response to sdpate

    Awesome!  Worked like a charm !

     

    Cheers,
    Ben

  • by Talkie Toaster,

    Talkie Toaster Talkie Toaster Jul 31, 2012 5:28 AM in response to sdpate
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 31, 2012 5:28 AM in response to sdpate

    The solution offered by sdpate pointed me in the right direction but didn't quite fix the problem.

     

    Checking the Console messages I noticed an issue with the calendar. I then realised that along with a slow mail.app and mail.app usage of CPU over 100%, an Exchange account on the Calendar was not accepting my password even though it appeared to do so.

     

    I solved the problem by opening the Address Book (Contacts) and in the Preferences noticing that the Exchange acount had been deleted. Restoring the Exchange account fixed my mail problems and the calender problems even though the account existed in these programs and the settings were correct.

  • by dsjr2006,

    dsjr2006 dsjr2006 Jul 31, 2012 12:26 PM in response to sdpate
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 31, 2012 12:26 PM in response to sdpate

    This mostly fixed my issue, mail is still not as responsive, but it is useable now.

     

    To clarify the steps should be:

    • Close Contacts & Mail if open
    • Go to System Prefs > iCloud & Uncheck contacts and choose option to delete from computer (make sure they are synced first)
    • Click the Finder icon, click Go in the menu bar & hold Option/Alt and you should see Library appear, click it when it does
    • Navigate to Application Support and move the AddressBook folder to the trash
    • Attempt to empty trash, if you cannot because it says an AddressBook file is still in use then proceed
    • Restart Your Computer
    • Empty the trashcan
    • Go to System Prefs > iCloud & check contacts to turn synching back on
    • Now try it out!
  • by graphicsluc,

    graphicsluc graphicsluc Jul 31, 2012 5:37 PM in response to sdpate
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 31, 2012 5:37 PM in response to sdpate

    I just installed Mountain Lion after using Lion and had all SORTS of problems with Mail application (freezing, deleted emails would reappear, crashing, etc. etc.). I called Apple Support and they told me to do this, and it works:

     

    shut down

    then turn on computer while holding command R

    when OS Utilities window comes up go to the top menu bar and click Utilities, then Terminal.

    type (all one word, lower case): reset password

    hit return

     

    go to the bottom of the reset password window that comes up,

    select the HD

    then click the Reset button at the bottom under "Reset Home Folder Permission and ACLs"

     

    then wait for it to finish

    click the red button to close the finder.

    then go to Terminal at top,

    Quit Terminal.

    Then restart under the apple logo icon.

     

    ...This resets the Permissions for all the applications in your computer and refreshes a lot of things that cause bugs, they say....

  • by graphicsluc,

    graphicsluc graphicsluc Jul 31, 2012 5:38 PM in response to sdpate
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 31, 2012 5:38 PM in response to sdpate

    I just installed Mountain Lion after using Lion and had all SORTS of problems with Mail application (freezing, deleted emails would reappear, crashing, etc. etc.). I called Apple Support and they told me to do this, and it works:

     

    shut down

    then turn on computer while holding command R

    when OS Utilities window comes up go to the top menu bar and click Utilities, then Terminal.

    type (all one word, lower case): reset password

    hit return

     

    go to the bottom of the reset password window that comes up,

    select the HD

    then click the Reset button at the bottom under "Reset Home Folder Permission and ACLs"

     

    then wait for it to finish

    click the red button to close the finder.

    then go to Terminal at top,

    Quit Terminal.

    Then restart under the apple logo icon.

     

    ...This resets the Permissions for all the applications in your computer and refreshes a lot of things that cause bugs, they say....

  • by Confused of Sussex,

    Confused of Sussex Confused of Sussex Jul 31, 2012 11:41 PM in response to graphicsluc
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 31, 2012 11:41 PM in response to graphicsluc

    This worked for me too.

  • by Nigelfromca,

    Nigelfromca Nigelfromca Aug 1, 2012 10:37 PM in response to graphicsluc
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 1, 2012 10:37 PM in response to graphicsluc

    This worked great. Many thanks !!

  • by Paul Raphaël,

    Paul Raphaël Paul Raphaël Aug 3, 2012 8:15 AM in response to sdpate
    Level 1 (25 points)
    Aug 3, 2012 8:15 AM in response to sdpate

    No such luck for me. I tried both sdpate's and graphicsluc's solutions several times without success. I even reinstalled ML from scratch, only to have the problem reappear after a few days.

     

    Anyone else still struggling with this?

  • by PhilWh,

    PhilWh PhilWh Aug 3, 2012 8:41 AM in response to Paul Raphaël
    Level 1 (14 points)
    iBooks
    Aug 3, 2012 8:41 AM in response to Paul Raphaël

    I'm only having this issue:

    "At various times, hitting the mail icon on the dock has no effect. The same is true with Command+TAB"

     

    I've tried all of the previously mentioned suggestions with no luck. 

    For example, if I'm in Safari and then I click the Mail icon in the dock, Mail will not come up, no matter how many times I hit it.  If I'm in a chat window and I see mail in the background, I can click on the Mail window but the chat window stays in the foreground and I cannot get to Mail.  Sometimes if I click enough times Mail will finally come up.  Same with Alt + Tab. 

    At various times it works just fine.

    Although, if I right click on the mail icon and click on "Inbox" then Mail will appear (sometimes).

  • by MacTechSteve,

    MacTechSteve MacTechSteve Aug 3, 2012 9:09 AM in response to PhilWh
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 3, 2012 9:09 AM in response to PhilWh

    I'm seeing the same exact unresponsiveness with the Mail app. I bet if you open the Console app in your Utilities folder you will see this error message every time you try to access Mail:

     

    8/3/12 12:04:27.787 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

    8/3/12 12:04:37.190 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

    8/3/12 12:04:38.018 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

    8/3/12 12:04:39.175 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

    8/3/12 12:04:45.585 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

    8/3/12 12:04:45.606 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

    8/3/12 12:04:53.959 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

     

    I’ve been troubleshooting this for days and nothing I’ve tried has fixed this.

     

    -Steve

  • by Confused of Sussex,

    Confused of Sussex Confused of Sussex Aug 3, 2012 9:42 AM in response to PhilWh
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 3, 2012 9:42 AM in response to PhilWh

    After I installed Mountail Lion all seemed fine. If I only had Mail open it worked fine, but as soon as I used any other application and then clicked back into Mail it was unresponsive and behaved oddly for a couple of minutes until it started to work normally. If I then used any other application and clicked back into Mail I had to go through the same tedious period of odd behavior.

    I tried getting rid of the Address file as mentioned elsewhere here but that didn't help.

    I called Apple and was talked through reconstructing my user identity and it worked. All seemed normal. I turned off the computer at the end of the day and the following day the same problem had returned.

    I called Apple and after several very long conversations and trying all sorts of things I was talked through deleting my preferences file whilst signed in as a root user. It worked and is still working, so that was obviously my iMac's problem. It meant that I lost all the settings in my applications so I had to go through each one fiddling to get them as I like, but I lost no data so it was well worth it.

    I hope this helps and sorry that I can't give you exact blow by blow keystrokes to solve the problem.

    Good luck.

  • by PhilWh,

    PhilWh PhilWh Aug 3, 2012 10:37 AM in response to MacTechSteve
    Level 1 (14 points)
    iBooks
    Aug 3, 2012 10:37 AM in response to MacTechSteve

    Yes, I see a similar message in Console:

     

    1:27:49 PM sandboxd ([541]) Mail(541) deny hid-control

  • by Nigelfromca,

    Nigelfromca Nigelfromca Aug 4, 2012 11:17 AM in response to Confused of Sussex
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 4, 2012 11:17 AM in response to Confused of Sussex

    Good to know.

     

    When I go to reply to an email in Mountain Lion, there is no paper plane send icon to actually send the email. Workaround is to save the email in drafts and then go to send it ,and the icon appears.

     

    Anybody else getting this ?

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