Accountsd CPU usage high in macOS Catalina

Thank you guys. You are awesome. I also have one iCloud email account (personal), one Office365 email account (work) and Gmail account (also another work place).

For those of you who use Outlook as your sole email client - do you find that Outlook and Mail do not sync Exchange emails correctly? Specifically if I read an email in Mail, Outlook does not register that as "read". Yes even after I sync on both ends and wait for ~1 hour or more. It's almost like Mail does not sync BACK to Exchange server correctly. On the other hand, if I read a message in Outlook, it correctly registers that in Mail.

So Mail -> Exchange seems broken. BUT Exchange -> Mail is fine.

Thoughts?

I have the same issues, done the same as mentioned above in the 1,2,3 steps...works for a short while, but not a long-term solution. I was forced to use Outlook mail so that I could continue using my 2019 MacBook Pro laptop. Super frustrating as Outlook simple is not as integrated at Mail. But now, my fan stops trying to take off like a jet engine. Would love to hear the solution so I can go back to Mail.

I currently have a ticket open with a senior Apple engineer on this problem. They took a significant number of snapshots a few weeks ago and have been keeping in touch with me as they are researching. I've been posting about the slow progress here: http://buymymonkey.wordpress.com

Soon as I hear from them, I'll update my post.

No, per my post just above yours, I spent over an hour with Apple engineers collecting diagnostics. They have taken those and are researching. Periodically they have updated me that it's still in progress. As soon as they come back to me, I'll update everyone.

My CPU is fine but memory usage for accountsd is still high. I have a Mojave computer and a Catalina computer both configured using Mac Mail the same way (8 accounts, some google, some yahoo, some exchange). The Mojave one the accountsd process stays at < 50MB. The Catalina one is up to 500MB in 24 hours. I've reported this to Apple on my open case with them on this problem.

I am really tired of Mail Catalina.

Today, I went back to an old Mac of mine with Sierra, and Mail runs smoother, faster and more reliable than Catalina. I am switching to another email client. This is annoying, an old Mac is faster than a new Mac checking emails. How can it be so difficult to fix this bug? iOS Mail seems perfectly fine.

I'm in the same boat - I have a Mojave Mac Mini that's setup exactly like my Macbook Pro running Catalina in terms of mail. Mojave maxes out at 50 to 80MB total - Catalina climbs to upwards of 1GB of memory before I have to kill it.

Well, on the morning after I have good news and bad news. It appears my Mail CPU % is going back up. It's sporadic whereas last night Mail was kept open with no issues. That's the bad news part. So may not be a permanent fix sadly. But on the good news part, since I was also testing Outlook where I saw Outlook grabbing 8-10 gb of memory, it's now just grabbing 837 mb of memory - and this seems consistent. So going to keep observing and trying and let me know what you experience, but there still seems to be positive moment but I can make no sense of it since it was only the mere opening of a second user account that got me here.

And worth me mentioning as a PS that I've never had issues with accountsd and suggestd as each of you have. My only Mail issue has been 150-200% CPU usage. So still curious since those of you that found issues with these processes whether this by accident fix improves those scenarios.

Mail is quiet as a kitten on mine with 5 MS accounts and iCloud.

So yours uses CPU with no mail accounts? And no Google calendars?

Even on a new user account?

If quiet, which account started up the fans?

keep looking for why your mac is different to most is all Im saying.

i added the email addresses one by each provider like gmx.de, gmail.de, freenet.de, and my own mailserver domains, then set mail checks to automatically and then just let it run. after about 20 mins: mac unresponsive, mail unresponsive and the same old situation in activity monitor. the new user account check i never do, although this is always the first thing apple support will tell me to do. the only reason they tell you this is when you confirm that the situation did not occur in a new user account setting is that the user cannot blame Apple and the culprit is the user's personal environment/installment, so no further support can be given and no deeper look into the issue is needed...

Regarding this answer, I do have exactly same behavior.

When my Macbook Pro 15 is online, its kind ... ok ... well not quite with mail.app open, but not a Boeing 747 takeoff sounds.

Once I disconnect from wifi or from personal hot-spot, its gonna to start-up the engines and going for full load until I kill the Mail.

Having only 8 accounts!

Crazy having those from the only one usable mail app in macos platform.

Because the owner of the thread felt (s)he had made the right changes to fix their problem.

It is only the OP who can mark posts solved or helpful.

If you want the same privilege start your own thread by all means.

In my opinion, apps like App Tamer are good reasonable patches but they do not solve the problem, they hide it.

Hiding the problem in the long run makes it worse since developers assume their current solution is good enough; so why even bother to fix something that no one has complains. In this thread we have seen that, some people just have that attitude: "Mail is fine because I only have one account... or I don't mind... or use another program, buy another computer, etc.... just stop critics".

This kind of approach is what has caused that even though we have Macs 1000x more powerful than 20 years ago, they consume more and more resources performing the same tasks, like reading emails. People read the same kind of emails (the protocol has almost no changes) 20 years ago on 60Mhz computer. It is unbelievable the amount of resources that an email program uses to perform the same task today just because bad development practices.

I fully agree that it is irresponsible and beyond annoying that apple cant figure out a fix. It’s been like what? A year?

I wonder if Apple has just gotten so big and/or complacent that they just don’t give a crap.

Mail issues seriously hurt my productivity and I have wondered once in a while if OSX Catalina was a huge mistake. Maybe I should just step down to previous version. Or explore the Windows platform (I have VMware + windows 10 on my Mac and it’s it bad at all!!).

<Rant Over>