Mail Locked at 25-30% CPU Usage

I've got the same problem, and rebooting is not helping out!
Apple, please fix this!

I have the same problem. I think it began after my last software update (iLife 9.0.4 and iTunes 9.0.3) please help!

I have the same problem.
Mail running at 20-30% CPU (Snow Leopard on pretty new Macbook)

Also I only just noticed this, maybe indeed related to the recent Update...?

btw: ichat has the same problem...

I'm seeing the exact same thing. Profiling Mail shows that it's spending a lot of time talking with the Address Book. I've got Exchange configured with both Mail and Address Book. When I try to remove my Exchange account from Address Book, Address Book just hangs. Seems like it's something related to Mail, Address Book, and Exchange. I have no idea how to fix it, though.

So my Mail hovers just under 30% CPU as well. It also eats 100k more memory every second - this morning before I noticed it got to 1.2GB. Address book exhibit the same behaviour, and if they are both running they hover around 24% CPU and both eat memory at the 100k per second rate. I am sure iCal was doing it too before but I can't reproduce that now.

I too am using Exchange for all 3 - don't know if it is to do with that though.

This is a serious problem.

OK - an hour or so later and Mail is back over 1GB - time to restart it again.

I had this problem initially with the upgrade to Snow Leopard, then it went away for some reason, and just over the weekend it suddenly reappeared with a vengeance. My CPU usage goes up to about 100% and Mail spins the beachball. After a while (20-30s) the CPU drops again, and Mail becomes responsive again. Luckily I have two cores, so my machine still works.

I scoured the net, and found these solutions:
1) Remove Smart Groups in AddressBook
2) Reset SyncServices: (in terminal, type "/System/Library/Frameworks/SyncServices.framework/Resources/resetsync.pl reset")
3) Delete the content of Users/YourName/Library/Application Support/SyncServices

After applying these fixes, the problem seems to have lessened, but not disappeared entirely.

This seems to be quite a common problem, with no definitive fix.

Be very careful when resetting sync services if you're using MobileMe.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1627

Don

My CPU use (on a G5) was significantly higher (roughly 100% of one CPU), but the memory growth sounds exactly what I was experiencing. I tried a number of the suggestions from various threads here (reset sync, safe boot, etc.), but none of them helped.

I did find a fix that worked for me:

+So, if you see the Mail application growing in size until it aborts, it appears that the most direct fix is to quit Mail and delete the ~/Library/Mail/AvailableFeeds and ~/Library/Mail/AvailableFeeds-journal files. No reboots or other actions are required.+

(more details in article http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10976938&#10976938 )

If this works for you, please post a follow-up.

Have you verified that this CPU usage is indeed the Mail application?

I have often been using an application (other than Mail) that seemingly made cpu usage jump up dramatically, and quitting the application stopped it. But it turned out to be the suspect application was creating many log entries in the console and other log files, thus causing the syslogd or other process to use a great deal of CPU.

To make sure run /Applications/Utilities/ActivityMonitor and click on the %CPU column header so the sort arrow points down. This will keep the name of the process that is using the most CPU at the top of the process list. If this is something like syslogd, then looking at the console log might point you in the direction that is causing mail to have problems. You might also check the Console Utility to search all Messages for "com.apple.mail", which might point you in the right direction.

Best of Luck
CMKRNL