Accountsd CPU usage high in macOS Catalina

Hi all!

Many years ago I remember a conversation in which someone said that Mail had very limited capacity. He said that the way it was designed when the 25 thousand emails threshold is reached the application is no longer effective. He believed the capacity was increased to 50 thousand when they retool it for Mac OS X from NeXT. That person also said that Apple (contrary to NeXT) was not in the business of providing applications that have to be used with such amounts of emails since most applications supplied with the OS were just "sample applications" and were not meant to kill the third party market. That conversation happened more than 10 years ago when 25 thousand emails was uncommon. Gmail did not exist at the time and he was concerned with SpyMac accounts that were offering 1GB free email.

I concur with some of the people in the discussion that it seems that the amount of email accounts and the amount of mail are the culprits rather than specific technologies (IMAP, Exchange, POP, etc.). It seems to me that fixing this issue could be difficult because of the way Mac Mail was originally developed.

Since the iOS app seems to be created more recently, in my opinion, this is going to be fixed when the iOS app and macOS app share the same code. I suspect that could happen in 10.16. I do not think this is just a bug that will be ironed in a .x release. I suspect, Apple must know about the bug, but it might be quantified that it is not affecting a significant number of users and those "power users" could switch to other email programs that are more robust handling huge amounts of email. At least until they fix the issue.

Windows Mail, for example, the one that comes with Windows 10 by default is also very limited in the amount of email that can handle and the Microsoft response when you hit that limit is Outlook.

Hi Macnecio,

For me this problem only started with 10.15 and I did not had it with 10.14.x.

And I had the same email accounts on 10.14.x.

The first version iOS was released 13 years ago (June 2007) so I don't feel it's just because mail on macOS is an old App.

I also think it has nothing to do with the number of mails or max storage it can handle.

As I do have a lot off customer information I store mail into a local folder (yes I do have a great and secure backup).

On a regular day I have with all 6 accounts no more than 3000 mails with a total off less than 400MB online.

Locally I have around 30GB of mails in storage.

May be it's a core Mail issue what can be hard to fix but as Apple Mail is core macOS and widely used so Apple SHOULD prioritize it and make it work. For now I can only advise customers to buy another mail client what gives extra costs :-(

Rgds

Rob

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.

I’ve tried that already. I have done everything to try to diagnose and fix this issue. Keychain, address book, new user account, format computer and resinstall OS X, different email account settings, turning off iCloud, the list goes on and on. Some fixes work for a few hours or even a day but the issue always return... Always.

I really think it has todo with exchange accounts. But there have been some that say otherwise.

i have called support, posted on forums, emailed Apple, gone into Apple store to talk to techs, submitted feedback.

end result, no one knows. No one cares.

I do have an older mbp. But it’s still quite fast. I run the adobe suite and other design applications without issue. But when it comes to mail, an application that I use to love for it’s simpleplicity and easy of use, my computer just slows down as mail demolishes the cpu

I’ve tried other mail apps but they all suck in comparison. Guess we will have to wait for the new OS X when it launches later in the year ( if at all this year)

Wtf Apple. Get your house in order.

Fair enough - you're right the core issue was CPU utilization. What I found was that after the size of that process grew up past 1.5 GB, it started swapping it out of memory which caused it to thrash the CPU. Maybe it will top off. I'm gonna let it run. You're right that my fans have been quiet. I'm just saying, I'm gonna keep an eye on that utilization. It can't turn out to be a bigger memory user than the Windows process.

The issue persists in the latest 10.15.2 Beta. If any of your can provide feedback to Apple on this please do. Use the Feedback Assistant app to open up a Feedback ticket.

Please open a support ticket with Apple. Right now I cannot get any response through Feedback.

kill accountsd and you should have more breath... can you tested new Beta?

Yep, I realized this as well and had to switch to Microsoft Outlook for Mac.

please don't encourage folk to install junk.

Use another mail app in preference.

I've tested with another Mail client, and Exchange Accounts still cause issues.

Make sure you post the list at

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

Apple will not read any other forum or indeed this user forum.

Re Mac Mail I would try Airmail 2 or Outlook.

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.

For me changing "Check for new messages" to 1 minute didn't work enough. I have two Gmail accounts, one personal and one Business. The only alternative has been disabling both Gmail accounts from Mail, which it is a great inconvenience.

Did someone get a response from Apple?

Thank you,

I've got a 2.9 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i9 with 32 GB of RAM. Basically no limit on available resources. suggestd is at 7GB usage, Mail is doing fine at 680 MB usage. The issue is CPU. suggestd hovers around 70% to 100% and Mac Mail will bounce around. The latest beta seems to have improved things a little bit in Mail. Now they have to fix suggestd.