Accountsd CPU usage high in macOS Catalina

I have this issue as well, and it is usually paired with high cpu use of the accountsd process. I have tried:

1. Re-install Catalina
2. Deleted all email accounts and recreated.
3. Deleted Mail preferences / accounts preferences / related preferences
4. Disabled contacts syncing
5. Disabled calendar syncing
6. Safe Mode Reboot

So far, nothing has fixed the issue. A reboot helps for 10-15 minutes, and the problem starts up again.

POTENTIAL FIX!!! Alright...I've done a ridiculous amount of research (I'm quasi-technical) and tried ALL of the 'suggestions'. This one is worked the best for me... I don't know the "why", I just know it's much more stable. It still pegs out here and there but Mail is as 'manageable' as it's ever been since Catalina:

• Narrowed it down to ONE gmail account. If I deactivated it, accountsd would stop crushing my CPU.
• I checked the Gmail > Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP configuration (in Gmail, not Mac Mail)
• POP had been ENABLED since 2005...lol. IMAP was enabled too (good) but I have no email-client that uses POP
• Three other Gmail accounts did NOT have POP enabled, thus, they would not peg CPU but the POP-enabled account would
• I DISABLED POP on that Gmail account and things have leveled out for now.

It would act up here and there, but after a couple opt+cmd+p+r reboots and updated to Catalina v10.15.2, so far so good. Hope this helps.

UPDATE: It's still a bit 'hit or miss'...uuuurg! But better... Worth trying.

Okay so I tried the steps exactly in  vip4lyf tutorial and I can say that it made no difference on my machine. I had no issues with AddressBook process and my contacts were syncing with iCloud just fine. Accountsd and Mail are still spiking to over 300% and I haven't been on since the reboot for more than 6 minutes. We need a real fix for this.

I am going to repost the steps I took to fix this issue here.

What I failed to mention before is that there was an additional step I had previously taken. During this previous step I applied a fix and thought it had resolved my issue, but the CPU spiked again after a reboot... however it may be relevant to the overall picture.

This was the first step I took: (Reference: https://buymymonkey.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/osx-catalina-cpu-spike-checking-mail-after-upgrade/)

1. Make a backup of Apple Mail messages if you store anything locally (like storing something On My Mac, downloading via POP3 etc).
2. Go to System Preferences > Internet Accounts.
3. Delete all Exchange accounts.
4. Delete ~/Library/Mail and ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail folders (this will reset Apple Mail and its preferences).
5. Restart the Mac and uncheck “Reopen windows when logging back in” to make sure Apple Mail won’t start after rebooting.
6. Go to Internet Accounts, click on +, select Exchange, enter your name and email address.
7. Click on Configure Manually and enter your password.
8. Uncheck everything (like Contacts, Notes, Calendar etc) and leave only Mail checked. You will be able to add it later (see below).
9. Start Apple Mail and go to Preferences > Accounts.
10. Select your Exchange account and click on Server Settings tab.
11. Uncheck “Automatically manage connection settings”.
12. Make sure both Internal and External URLs are set to https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx.
13. Close Preferences and restart Apple Mail.
14. If you need Contacts and Calendars, go to System Preferences > Internet Accounts, select your Exchange account and enable the services you need to sync.

I applied the above fix and for a day all worked well until I rebooted my machine. After digging into the console again I noticed an kernal error that pointed me to the addressbook being corrupted.

That kernal error looked like this:

To fix the corrupted addressbook I applied the following steps: (Reference: https://appuals.com/fix-mac-running-slow-due-addressbooksourcesync/)

I first Quit Mail.

Back up your Contacts locally and then quit Address Book (Contacts).

1. Launch the Contacts
2. Click on File from the menu bar at the top of your screen.
3. Click on Export.
4. Select Contacts Archive.
5. Choose the location where you would like to save the file.
6. Set the name for the file, and click on Save.

Now, go to icloud.com and check if you have all of your contacts there.

Launch Activity Monitor and make sure AddressBookSourceSync is not running. If it is, double–click it and select Quit from the window. (** I did not see this process running)

Now go to your user’s library (~/Library/Application Support/Address Book/). 

Delete everything within this folder (backup if you want, but it will all get regenerated)

Now, go into System Preferences and click on iCloud.

Navigate to Contacts and check off the box.

Now, recheck the box, and the sync will start. Give it about 5 min and youll notice that your contacts have regenerated and those files you had previously deleted have been regenerated.

Once the contact were back, I restarted mail and have had 0 issues for the past 4-5 days.

I hope this helps others.

Since I upgraded with Catalina, it starts to go wrong when :

• the wifi is low, or when I loose a shared mobile connection
• Mail app is active (6 accounts including one Exchange)

--> The accountsd CPU usage can go up to 600%

I explained before that my 2018 MacBook Pro has been destroyed (screen + Touch Bar) by overheating due to this issue.

The last Update did not improve the situation...

Any magic trick mentioned before didn't work for me.

It is a serious Catalina issue.

I am asking Apple to solve this issue using this link:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/mail.html

Does anybody know what else can we do?

We are now on 10.15.5 and still is not solved. Please reopen the thread. Do not mark it as solved!

Folks - I think each and every one of us should post to the feedback form that Macnecio provided. Let's try other feedback channels too.

Here is the thread again: https://www.apple.com/feedback/mail.html

I've posted my feedback already.

Hey,

Never replied before, but had this problem too for about a week and seem to have put together a few things that worked for me and it hasn't returned since. Not sure if one, two, or all of them together fixed the problem, but hope this helps!

This started when I upgraded to iOS 13 on my iPhone and upgraded to Catalina so I figured there was something going on between the communication of handoff or accounts. Here are the steps I took to solve it;

1. Updated to the most recent iOS 13.2.3
2. Remove all "recovered messages" in my Mail to the appropriate folders (I have 4 email accounts)
3. Delete all "recovered messages" folders from the mail app
4. Take all accounts offline on my MacBook
5. Completely remove the Gmail account (from mail and internet accounts). This should update your iPhone as well, but check just in case
6. Turn off Handoff on iPhone and on MacBook
7. Restart Mac

I read somewhere in the interwebs that the problem could be with gmail so the second part process was;

1. open safari and log into gmail
2. go to settings in gmail
3. go to Forwarding and POP/IMAP
4. POP should be DISABLED and IMAP should be ENABLED
5. Change IMAP to enabled (for some reason mine was disabled, but I never had a problem sending or receiving mail)
6. Save changes and close safari
7. Open Mail and click "Mail -----> Add accounts"
8. Re-add your gmail and check the settings (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229?visit_id=637106605790408389-2176381170&hl=en-GB&rd=1) it should do the IMAP and SMTP on its own, but just in case
9. Sync everything and wait for it to finish, then quit mail
10. Turn on Handoff on iPhone and MacBook
11. Restart MacBook and Restart iPhone

So far, the CPU usage has returned to normal and my fans are no longer running at high speed and draining the battery. Hope this works for you!

I have read this thread with great interest as I have the same issue and I have the new 16 inch MBP with 32 gigs of RAM and have been baffled with what's going on. Given all the other posts, some of the remedies suggested don't apply to me:

• I don't have gmail
• I don't have MAIL checked under iCloud as the email I use the most is on Office 365 Exchange
• I don't have FileVault on

Also, interestingly, my issues has always been CPU usage with Mail. suggestd and accountsd (neither of which do I know what they relate to) have never been nuts for me like others who have posted. They get high but not near as high as others have mentioned

But I am mainly posting to say that I was able to get in contact with a Senior Advisor at Apple who of course confirmed none of this is normal behavior and we ran the Capture Data app they provide during support and have submitted my logs via that app so that the engineers can review it. If they come back with any interesting suggestions not already covered here I'll post them.

yes. this happened with the first install of Catalina. It actually wiped years of emails for some reason. I had to do a restore from Google but there are still years worth of missing emails. That was strange because doing that did bring back others. I don't know why Google didn't restore everything. Anyway, I was ****** but I treated it like a house cleaning. I'm on an iMac Pro and mail (better since .3) if left running will bring my computer to a crawl. This is what I have to find a fix for.

FYI, I've tried other clients but they pale in comparison. Here's what I found:

1. airmail slows to an unusable crawl with large accounts.
2. Outlook does not play well with apple contacts and the lack of avatars is blah. also (annoying) it won't start from a unified inbox. Always the main account.
3. Spark is the best alternative so far but it is buggy as well and needs restarts often.
4. postbox is like airmail (with many large accounts). Clunky and slow no matter how you configure it.
5. Browser/Kiwi is good but that leaves my exchange accounts still needing a client if I want them all in one place.
6. email client like airmail/postbox
7. Thunderbird is actually descent but by the time you add extensions to make it look and work like something from the last 5 years it bogs down too.

Apple for years had gotten a bad rap but I never knew why. Up until Catalina it has been rock solid and did everything I needed it to. I never thought about my email. That is supposed to be the easiest thing your computer can tackle...

Hello!

I have had this problem for a significant time and I have tried almost everything that has been discussed in this thread and many others. I am on Catalina 10.15.4 and the problem still persists. So far:

• The problem is related to Exchange accounts. No gmail accounts, yahoo, IMAP, or anything else.
• The issue makes working with Apple Mail a pain since accountsd grows over time and chokes the program. The behaviour I see usually makes accountsd to create many threads and interferes even with the Mail Interface making Apple Mail unresponsive.

The only solution that I have found is:

• Disable "Mail" on the Exchange accounts in Mail>Preferences>Accounts. Syncing calendars seems not to have any issue.
• Create another account as an IMAP account with the Exchange email address for e-mail only. At the end your Exchange account will be only used to sync Calendars and the normal IMAP account to access e-mails. For example account@server.com (Exchange type for calendars) account@server.com (IMAP for mail).
• In order to create an IMAP mail account to access your Exchange server you need also the following information:
• IMAP4 Server name: outlook.office365.com
• SMTP Server name: smtp.office365.com
• Information taken from this site:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/set-up-email-on-other-internet-capable-phones-and-tablets-775748a1-0075-40fd-b630-1d2a84be081a?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Once I have done this, I close Mail, open activity monitor and Force kill accountsd. Then reopen mail and everything has been working smoothly since then. I think this could be a work around until a proper solution is provided by Apple.

Okay so given all this, here's a permanent solution that appears to be innocuous. By the use of crontab, I'm going to kill the accountsd process every morning at 1:00am. Easy to install - here's the steps - and while it takes a little technical knowhow - not much. Also, use this at your own risk. I've not tested running this script forever. It doesn't seem to cause any issue but I'm not responsible either way.

• Open Terminal
• type

cd /tmp

• and press enter. That will take you to the tmp directory
• use vi to create this simple shell script in the /tmp directory - first launch vi by typing:

vi kill_accountsd.sh

• Go into insert mode by type the letter i
• Copy and past the below text into vi

echo "$(date) - Starting accountsd kill process..." >> /tmp/kill_accountsd.out

killall -9 accountsd

echo "Killed..." >> /tmp/kill_accountsd.out

• Save and exit vi by pressing escape and then typing colon and wq! - in other words, type

:wq!

• and press enter. That will create the shell script in your tmp directory. You can see that it's there by typing:

ls -ltr kill*

• Change the shell script to executable by typing:

chmod a+x kill_accountsd.sh

* Okay now you have an executable script in your tmp directly. Now we need to install into cron. Cron is just a process that wakes up whenever you tell it to and runs commands (usually a shell script, etc.). At the prompt type:

crontab -e

• You'll be take to a vi session where you can edit the various cron commands. This is very much like using vi (in fact it is) so type the letter i to insert, and then you'll want to enter this rather cryptic line:
• 
  

5 1 * * * . /tmp/kill_accountsd.sh

• There's a space between each number and asterisk AND a space between the period and the /tmp. What this is saying is, wake up every morning at 1:05am and run this script.

• Hit the escape and save by typing:

:wq!

And that's it. The script will be launched every morning at 1:05am and it will kill the accountsd process and write out what it did to a log in the /tmp directory called "kill_accountsd.out". If you're so inclined after doing this, the next day bring up terminal, change to the /tmp directory and type:

cat kill_accountsd.out

And it will show you hopefully that it awakened and killed the process, which restarts automatically anyway. I'm going to try this on both of my macs and keep it running for a while.

By the way, to stop this from running, edit your crontab using the 'crontab -e' command above and navigate to the line using your arrow keys (do not press 'i') and type 'dd' and it will delete the line. Or you navigate to the start of that line, press 'i' and enter a pound side at the first character '#' and that comments out the line. Then save with ':wq!' and you're good.

Let me know if anyone else does this and how it turns out. Not a great fix but stops the bleeding.

If the problem does not occur in a new user account then there is a remedy.

• Move all your data to the new user account.

You could close Mail and delete the Mail/V7 folder in your ~Library but you probably would not hit the bad file.

You could use Easyfind to delete every mail oriented file under your user account. Might fix it

So please take 20 minutes to create the user account and try Mail there.

IF indeed the fault is in your user account but not an another account, in my opinion you can wait as long as you want for a fixed update, it will not come.

• Move your stuff to the other account or
• use another mail client.