Mail consumes 100% CPU "updating smart mailbox counts" about 50% of time

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Mail consumes 100% CPU "updating smart mailbox counts" about 50% of time

I am no longer able to leave Mail running on my machine. It spends about 50% of the time "updating smart mailbox counts" (visible in the activity window). While it is doing this, it consumes 100% of a CPU according to "top" and makes my machine virtually unusable. What is particularly galling is that the results or always completely inaccurate. My "smart mailbox unread counts" are always wrong, not matter how long I leave Mail running. I am therefore forced to quit Mail whenever I've done a batch of e-mail reading, and re-launch it when I want to check mail. Often, Mail refuses to quit, and greys out the "quit" menu item forever. I then have to Force Quit it to get my machine back under control.

MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.4)

Posted on Apr 22, 2009 5:09 AM

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Answer 1

V.K.

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56,174 points

Apr 22, 2009 6:01 AM in response to RPTB1

try deleting all your smart mailboxes. if that doesn't help rebuild Mail index. quit mail and delete the file /users/username/library/mail/envelope index. then start Mail and let it import (that means reindex). see if it works ok after that.

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Answer 2

RPTB1 Author

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Apr 22, 2009 6:23 AM in response to V.K.

Hi VK. Thanks for the suggestions.

When you say "try deleting them" do you mean that I should do without them? I rely on them heavily for my day-to-day work. Or do you mean delete and re-create them?

I have tried rebuilding indexes and also deleting the envelope index, which then took five or six hours to rebuild. No improvement.

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Answer 3

V.K.

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56,174 points

Apr 22, 2009 6:28 AM in response to RPTB1

RPTB1 wrote:
Hi VK. Thanks for the suggestions.

When you say "try deleting them" do you mean that I should do without them? I rely on them heavily for my day-to-day work. Or do you mean delete and re-create them?

yes, I mean deleting and recreating them. try that. quit Mail, go to the directory /users/username/library/mail and delete the files SmartMailboxes.plist and
SmartMailboxes.plist.backup. start mail and see what happens.

I have tried rebuilding indexes and also deleting the envelope index, which then took five or six hours to rebuild.

I can't understand why it took so long.

Message was edited by: V.K.

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Answer 4

RPTB1 Author

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Apr 22, 2009 6:45 AM in response to V.K.

I'll try both these steps overnight after my daily backup. I imagine that removing the smart mailboxes will stop mail (wrongly) counting them, but that putting them back will start it again, but I'll try. I'll also see how long it takes to rebuild the index.

FWIW,

$ sqlite3 "Envelope Index" "select count(*) from messages"
249438

And about 500 folders.

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Answer 5

aisaacv

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Apr 22, 2009 6:46 AM in response to RPTB1

Ok, yesterday I was reading some thread in this forum because I was having the same issue ( http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8428436) My problem was fixed after I uninstalled Flip4Mac (as suggested in the end of that thread)... Now Mail is behaving super good. No CPU Load, No, noisy fan 😀

If you have Flip4Mac installed and you receive video or WMV attachments that could be the problem.

Uninstall Flip4Mac and Install VLC and Perian.

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Answer 6

May 3, 2009 2:32 PM in response to RPTB1

I've had this problem as well. I've posted a message which might hold the solution but would be interested to know what you think...

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1995528&stqc=true

Any feedback would be appreciated...

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Answer 7

RPTB1 Author

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May 17, 2009 4:03 AM in response to clown guy

Thanks for your reply, but this is not the same problem.

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Answer 8

RPTB1 Author

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May 17, 2009 4:04 AM in response to aisaacv

Thanks for your suggestion, but this is not the same problem. I'm not looking at messages with video attachments. Uninstalling Flip4Mac did not solve my problem.

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Answer 9

RPTB1 Author

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May 17, 2009 6:43 AM in response to RPTB1

So, I tried deleting and re-creating the Envelope Index. In fact this took 45 minutes — I was mis-remembering how long it took last time. This has not solved the problem.

I also tried deleting and re-creating my smart mailboxes. This has not solved the problem.

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Answer 10

stulli

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May 29, 2009 2:11 AM in response to RPTB1

I have a similar problem.

Mail starts eating up all CPU and RAM resources at the same time. After a short hang its CPU usage drops and RAM is set free again. This occurs periodically about each minute. I tried all suggestions in the forum from Onyx cleaning over envelope index deletion to Flip4Mac uninstall. Nothing helps.

Switching to Thunderbird is ok, but i'd really like to use Mail again and I'm desperately looking for a final solution.

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Answer 11

May 30, 2009 11:23 AM in response to stulli

I have same problem with my g4 17" laptop. (using Latest Leopard/mail) ... I finally had to delete all my smart mailboxes off the laptop since the CPU was going at 100% updating those silly unread counts on the smartmail boxes... something I could care less about. My fan was always running since the CPU was heating up the laptop. Now on my iMac duel processor, I imagine it's doing same thing with all my smartmailboxes, but it's so fast it doesn't bother me. Still, apple has a problem here. The other problem I've seen is I'll sometimes click on a smartmail box and it won't show me the right list of emails... it will show many tons of other email instead of those in the criteria. If I quit mail and start again, then it usually works. This doesn't happen all the time, but does several times a day. Any one else have this problem?

I really get so much value out of smartmail boxes with my various clients, friends, etc. I hope there is a solution to this so I can start using them on my laptop again. Do you think Apple is aware/working on this problem???

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Answer 12

RPTB1 Author

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Jun 1, 2009 5:06 AM in response to Clifford Durfee

I have had all the problems you describe, and posted them to Apple Developer Connection's bug reporter. After wasting my time demanding lots of evidence, they just closed my bugs as "known issues". That was a long time ago. They know, but they're not fixing it fast. That's why I posted here to see if anyone knew a workaround.

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Answer 13

admench

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Jul 28, 2009 5:33 AM in response to RPTB1

I have the same Mail-CPU hog problem. I have tried resetting iSync, deleting my RSS folder and deleting Flip4Mac, with NO CHANGE. This is a very annoying problem.

Any other ideas?

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Answer 14

Aug 22, 2009 7:16 AM in response to admench

My Mail application was also consuming my CPU and was unusable. Here's how I finally solved the problem:

1) Open up your activity monitor so you can watch the Mail application and see when it begins to spike the CPU.
2) Maybe open up your Console as well to view the system log file for Mail log messages.
3) Open up Mail and goto Window -> Activity so you can see what Mail is doing when your cpu spikes.
4) Using the Activity Window you should be able to figure out what is causing the problem. You can use the Stop button in the Activity Window to stop the activity causing the issue.

In my case, Mail was trying to sync a message with my IMAP server. All I did was hit the stop button in the Activity Window for that activity. I haven't had a problem with Mail since.

Hope this helps someone as the Mail CPU spike issue was really annoying for me and I couldn't use the Mail program for about 1 month.

Good luck!

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