Accountsd CPU usage high in macOS Catalina

And you only have one chosen account checked for calendar, notes, contacts, reminders?

The graph is declining, how long does the high cpu last?

With 365 subscriptions I would use Outlook, I do.

just found out the same thing. My MacBook is plugged in during the night and it was pretty warm in the morning and I found out it is the Mail app that is the cause of this.

hope they solve this fast.

So far, this seems to have fixed my high cpu problem. I have work email, Yahoo, and Gmail, so this setting is helping with the mix of email accounts I have. Thanks for the suggestion.

I set mine to check every 5 minutes.

yep agreed on icloud dont trust it anymore for docs / desktop or mnotes - corrupted data all sorts weve had sisseus across the fleet here- email - when i said it worked - its 'better' not 100% great, still flipping between 60% and 200% - at least laptop fans have stopped and heho cant check my icloud email lol (ios only now i guess) sigh

10.15.2 still not fixed! ugh. It seems better. I was able to go 10 minutes or so as what looked like normal usage. The cpu spiked after that. Same as before - accountsd and mail app. For me it's around 500% collectively. How is that even a thing?

I have the same issue but unfortunately this solution did not work for me. I don't log into Gmail accounts but Outlook accounts instead and the issue persists. Weird thing for me is that the problem only happens when there's no internet. When I connect back to WIFI the fan immediately stops roaring. And this can repeat...

"...and what the heck is mail doing anyway storing things in iCloud? Shouldn’t IMAP store anything Mail requires in the first place?)..."

Simple. If you use your xxxxx.icloud.com Apple address for emails then you need mail checked in iCloud account settings, otherwise not checked.

You are likely right. I can add that my iCloud account is based on an existing email account (actually Exchange) that is not an Apple email address. I have a separate .Mac email address that I don't use for iCloud services...just for email. My email stores are very large...nearing 50 GB and I have 3 of them...all Office 365 exchange. Anyway, it's still a fix for me. Let's hope Apple figures it out. This was not a problem under Mojave...only Catalina.

It may well depend on when the Apple account was created. In the years before I joined, people had me.com(?) etc accounts

When I joined we used an existing account like Outlook mail and it was an alias for the iCloud.com account, though both accounts were viable for mail.

I understand that aliases are not created these days.

Perhaps people with this problem are in another of these phases than myself.

Tens of Gigabytes of IMAP mail is not in my personal experience.

Interesting theory about FileVault. Unfortunately it's required in my organization. Sadly, I have to report that unchecking Mail from the iCloud services list doesn't seem to resolve the issue. Although it seemed to improve...the issue has returned. I am getting high CPU usage from accountsd and Mail that is bringing this fully spec-ed out 16" MBP to it's knees on silly stuff. I have to keep Mail closed to do any work which is really frustrating.

I don't have a machine that I can test the Beta on. I'll just have to wait for the full version to come. As for killing accountsd, is that a good idea. It does eventually finish it's process. It just does it's thing anytime I am clicking on Mail or trying to delete mail. It seems to be working constantly as I am working inside of Mail or at least checking on new emails (push notifications) etc.

Thanks for the quick response. Well, here's the thing, as I type this, my MAIL is crazy slow - takes 1-2 minutes to even load the body of an email. So per your note, I go to Activity Monitor and look at the memory use of accountsd and it's just 209.1 mb compared to your big amount where as my Mail program is 1.21 gb for Memory. I've never had as high a number for accountsd or suggestd as the others have. But I'm monitoring them now thanks to this thread. But Mail is the one I have the issue with. The CPU % varies consistently between 121% and 140%

I am the same as @christian222. I don't see any addressbook process in Activity Monitor unless in Catalina it's been discontinued somehow. My main issue is with Mail so I fail to see how this address book thing will solve it if nothing relating to the AddressBook is showing up in Activity Monitor.

I have the accountsd and mail cpu issue bad on my 16" MBP. I am an admin for my exchange accounts and can confirm that I have never had Email Archiving turned on for any of my Exchange accounts. So that isn't the issue for me.