Mail essentially unusable after upgrade

The issue appears to occur whenever macOS is unable to reach an email server. I don't know for certain but I guess macOS tries to log into a mail server every now and then and if it for some reason cannot do so, it panics and its CPU usage skyrockets. For me, this is often caused by a brief interruption of my Wi-Fi network or even just when moving my laptop around from place to place.

Though I have even seen it occur in cases where I simply disable my Wi-Fi. It's like macOS can't accept the fact that it's not going to be able to reach the server 100% of the time. It's really ridiculous.

The only fix I found was to remove both my Microsoft Exchange Account and my Gmail account from Accounts in my system preferences. I saw on Reddit you can then go Mail settings and manually input the IMAP settings for any mail servers and the issue will be resolved. However, the downside is that any contacts or calendar events stored on those servers will not be synced to macOS. That is something to consider.

Let me know if you have any other ideas or workarounds.

Yes. This is a nightmare. I turned off two of my accounts with the most emails, but this did not help. CPU constantly 170% and above. Crashes occasionally not from doing anything. I will go away and come back and it has crashed. Just typing is slow. It can take 10 minutes to open an email while it shows "Loading..." I'm very sorry I upgraded.

I have this same problem on my 2018 MacBook Pro. I upgraded to Catalina a few days ago and Mail has been horribly slow since then, using over 150% of the CPU. At the same time, another process called accountsd jumps in and uses 250% to 450%. The fan goes crazy controlling the heat. Mail is practically unusable due to doing the very slow crawl.

HELP!!!!

I'm surprised that that didn't fix it. If you remove all of your Internet Accounts, there are no servers for the accountsd process to panic about being unable to reach.

That was how I resolved the issue.

Side note though: I also switched to using Outlook until the issue is fixed because one of my other email servers has two-factor authentication that is not compatible with manual input of mail settings.

Thanks buymymonkey, but in my case, I don't have a ghost keychain. I have login, iCloud, System, System Roots, and they all have stuff in them.

Since my last post on Oct 19, my CPU has died down. That may just be for the time being, and it will start up again. But, I still practically can't search, or it takes forever and just displays "Searching..." Fetching new mail can take minutes. Just clicking on a different email or mailbox can take 10-30 seconds to view.

I had/have the same problem. Removing all Exchange/Office365 accounts immediately solves the issue with accountsd taking way to much CPU.

Would be great if this could be tested/confirmed by more of you. I really prefer to use Mail.app over Outlook but until this issue is fixed - zero - choice is given. Mail.app is unusable when accountsd is not handling exhcange accounts.

I still can’t search in mail. I’ve tried a number of suggestions in terminal and safe modes. I do it restart then it works then 30 min later I can’t search again. I reverted back to an old MacBook since mail is unusable and restarting my machine every 30 min is ridiculous. I wish I never updated my machine. It’s been a nightmare from mail to other apps. Almost as bad as the new os on my iPhone. Horrible

Thanks mate. I had a "ghost keychain" left over from when I had something called Sophos Antivirus more than 6 years ago. I uninstalled the app but this Sohpos keyhain reference was left over. I tried removing it through Keychain and it wouldn't work despite trying both buttons.

I ended up having to manually edit my com.apple.security-common.plist file through terminal in order remove the Sophos Keychain reference. After doing that, I relinked my Gmail and Exchange accounts in my System Preferences. I redownloaded all my mail.

It's now two days later and I have not had a single instance of my accountsd process hogging my CPU.

Thank you so much!

I haven't had the out of control CPU usage, but every day or two accountsd grows to more than 2GB which really puts a damper on the performance of everything—even with 16GB of RAM on a brand new 2019 MacBook.

I'd expect closing mail, calendar, and other apps that use internet accounts would allow it to recover on its own, but the only way to recover from the memory leak seems to be rebooting.

☹️

I have a 2019 MacBook as well, and it's basically an iPad.. or very basic stuff.. apple wants everything in the cloud, but they only offer 2TB cloud space.. then many of these MacBooks barely come with enough hard drive space then you add new updated OS and anything else on your laptops eats up the rest of the space. so you basically are left with external hd / deleting stuff to make room all the time.. Its mind blowing how hard they make everything....

I have solved the Mail problem. I wrote up what I did, leveraging a "purge" command that I'd never heard of in Terminal. Basically for each Mail account (under Mac Settings -> Accounts), I disabled mail, calendar, contacts, reminders on every single account. Then I ran the "purge" command. Restarted in Safe Mode and ran Mail (this apparently does something). And restarted and re-checked everything and it's been perfect. Only side effect is that Time Machine decided to back everything up again.

Here's more details ->

https://buymymonkey.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/osx-catalina-cpu-spike-checking-mail-after-upgrade/

Installed 10.15.3 Public Beta (19D49f), still problems with Exchange-Accounts.

I've tried everything, including the advices from buymymonkey (thanks!), but no progress on that.

Service accountsd still on 300% CPU-Usage while offline. Outlook works without any trouble.

Please fix this!