Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Level 1

5 points

Memory Leak with Mail.app

Ok, I am having a remarkable amount of trouble with mail.app these days and I am completely unable to explain it. Currently, I am having this problem with my 2ghz Macbook AND my 2.3ghz Mac Pro...both are running 10.5.6 and the Macbook has 2gb of RAM, the Mac Pro has 6gb.

Recently (within the last 3 weeks), everytime mail.app is open, it quickly steals a lot of CPU and an increasing amount of RAM until it crashes (gets to ~1.5gb on the macbook, ~3gb on the Mac Pro). I have two accounts, my MobileMe account and an Imap account...when I either remove the MobileMe account or disable it from the preferences, the app runs fine...no memory hogging or anything. I've tried deleting the preferences, removing feeds, rebuilding the mailboxes, reinstalling mail.app from my installation dvd (all based on research on these forums and elsewhere) and nothing fixes it. If I do any of these, the app will open fine the first time, but upon quitting and restarting it, will again hog all memory until it crashes. This is infuriating.

So it happens on both of my machines...exact same thing, with the problem fixing itself if I get rid of the MobileMe account. To me, this seems like a server issue, but I am unable to find anyone that has a similar issue. Any help would be appreciated...I can post crash logs, if necessary.

Mac Pro, Macbook, Macbook, iPhone, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on May 11, 2009 8:12 PM

19 replies

Zogma

Level 1

8 points

Apr 16, 2010 9:07 PM in response to Zogma

Ah, I'm not the only one.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=757776

Apr 19, 2010 1:20 PM in response to Zogma

I had only one RSS feed, the default Apple News one. I deleted even that, but Mail still grows beyond 2 GB of real memory for me. Apparently, RSS feeds is not the cause, or not the only one, of the memory leak. I've tried the Safe reboot, deleting the AvailableFeeds file. Nothing has worked for me so far.

I just decided to switch from Entourage...but it looks as if I have to go back for the time being.

st!b

Level 1

0 points

Jun 17, 2010 1:53 AM in response to Allen Watson1

I find the problem only occurs when it's updating one particular RSS feed - I added the Ted Talks RSS feed, ( http://www.ted.com/talks/rss) and now Mail is "adding 108 articles" and the Memory usage is heading for the roof (7G last time I checked, and about as much Virtual Memory). Removing the RSS feed seems to fix the problem.

Obviously a leak. I was hoping the update (4.3) would fix it, but no.

Jun 29, 2010 2:17 PM in response to st!b

I just ran into the very same situation - I added two TED talk RSS feeds to Mail before

feed://feeds.feedburner.com/tedtalks_video
feed://feeds.feedburner.com/tedtalks_audio

and a few moments later Mail started growing to several GBs of size only stopping on a force kill signal. Took me some time to identify the exact cause since I added several feeds at once.

From a debugging point of view this should be easy to reproduce -> hopefully there will be a fix, this one is really nasty, especially once the machine starts swapping. Even the activity monitor crashed, never seen this before.

Funny, the TED podcasts cause stalled popovers in iTunes on the iPad as well...

Memory Leak with Mail.app