Accountsd CPU usage high in macOS Catalina

I have to say that this of everything I have tried had a good result for me. Of course it's only been a few hours but deleting the keychain folder, restarting, opening mail, and reauthenticating my account worked. I did not have a problem with reauthentication so I did not have to put the folder back. Honestly this makes a lot of sense that the issue could be related to some keychain permission issue with Mail and accountsd.

I will report back if I have any more problems but for now it's been a couple hours and it working better. I also want to add that I have 6 Office 365 accounts with two factor authentication enabled (so web auth process) plus a GMAIl and .Mac. Fingers crossed this fixed it.

I have spent days trying to fix this with no results. (10.15.4 Macbook Pro) Upgraded from Mojave.

I have 30 pop/imap accounts and one exchange.

I can 100% confirm that the issue is with the exchange account, and tried all the fixes, resets, remove, rebuild etc etc.

The activity monitor shows that exchange is continually connecting which holds up all the other connections and overloads the CPU.

Without the exchange mail is running perfectly. Actually even better than before. No fan issues no CPU load etc.

As soon as the exchange account is added it all goes crazy.

I have now had to resort to Outlook for my exchange account which runs perfectly in outlook.

I am not a fan of Microsoft but now am forced to use their product on a Mac which runs better than the native mail application.

This is a major issue for Catalina users and Apple should fix it quick. The only solution is to provide a bug fix as downgrading to Mojave is somewhere I don't want to go and I've been using Macs for 25+ years.

Ive had some success this AM with disabling my iCloud Contacts.

Contacts App > Preferences > iCloud Card DAV and unchecking ALL accounts.

This will remove all your contacts from your contacts app.

Generally the CPU will spike within an hour of using the app. In general I have to restart mail 10-15 times a day. I too have gone through many fixes, and at times that I have solved the issue only to find out that it comes back.

Doing the above is just another test for me. If it ends up working I may just import all my contacts manualy and keep iCloud contacts off.

What lead to todo this is entries in the console app the referenced the address book and Card DAV

messages like:

"Client <private> is not allowed to access accounts of type com.apple.account.CardDAV."

Sandbox: imagent(472) deny(1) mach-lookup com.apple.AddressBook.ContactsAccountsService

Unentitled access by client 'AddressBookManag' (selector: accountsWithAccountType:handler:)

Sandbox: imagent(472) deny(1) mach-lookup com.apple.AddressBook.ContactsAccountsService

Database preparation failed: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=4099 "The connection to service on pid 0 named com.apple.AddressBook.ContactsAccountsService was invalidated." UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=The connection to service on pid 0 named com.apple.AddressBook.ContactsAccountsService was invalidated.}

There are more messages beyond those above. But I have noticed these appear while using mail.

ITs been a few hours only, but no CPU spike. If anything the CPU is running faster than usual.

ITs an easy test todo and can easily be reverted by rechecking the boxes. Anyone mind testing this solution with me and providing your results?

-tom

I found a different solution that worked for me. After some experimentation, I found that something in my att.net email account was causing Mail to chew up CPU time. I discovered this by deleting my email accounts one at a time until I found the source of the problem. When I re-added the att.net account, the problem recurred within a couple of hours.

Next, I deleted (actually, archived) four years of old emails and the problem went away. After about three months, it came back. So I deleted my att.net account, and the problem seems to have been eliminated permanently. Maybe some spammer was sending me emails that somehow were using the processor? I don't know. But right now, the problem seems to be fixed.

Apple Mail usually takes up a high CPU on my Mac computer after the macOS Catalina update. It happens more and more frequently, it often causes my computer to freeze, which affects my work. Even after updating to the new macOS 10.15.4, it still did not stop, it's time to solve this problem. Fortunately, there are some fairly simple solutions to the Mail high CUP issue. For a period of time after that, CPU usage has been normal.

1. iCloud sync issues

If your Mac turn on Mail for iCloud, Apple Mail needs to sync data to iCloud. When the disk needs to read and write large amounts of data, as well as the upload and download of data through the network, it results in higher CPU utilization. Go to System Preferences -> Apple ID -> iCloud -> Uncheck Mail.

2. Quite com.apple.AddressBookSourceSync Process

Some Apple users have reported that iCloud's process of syncing Gmail contacts may cause this issue. Find the com.apple.AddressBookSourceSync Process in Activity Monitor.app(/Applications/Utilities), then force quit it.

3. Disable automatilly connection setting of Mail account

a). Open the Mail Preferences

b). Go to "Accounts" and select your Provider/Account

c). Click Server Settings (the last right tab)

d). Disable the Automatically manage connection settings (checkbox)

4. Delete Mail logs and cache files

a). Remove the Log folders in /Users/~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Logs

b). Remove the cache folders under /Users/~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Caches

c). Remove the temp folders and cache folders under /private/var/folders, They are not fixed paths, they are variable.

If you find another solution, Let us know your experience with this issue in the comments below.

Thanks

Guys, based on your reactions I did an experiment.

I figured out, that it absolutely have no connection what type of account are use using. I do have all major account, iCloud, few gmails, few outlooks, few custom imap.

Even a GMail (not GSuite) account caused me a troubles with CPU load.

I went thru keychain and deleted all mentions of that account. Like really all of them. For applications, token and so on.

Now, I can have this account enabled without any impact.

I also figured out, that in my keychain, there are a lot duplicities, with different passwords.

For example I had four of smtp outlook.com logins, last updated in 2013 - 2015.

I purge those stuff as well. Right now, it looks like it does help.

Try to cleanup your keychain and report back, if this would help also to others, it would be awesome.

Hi TDOGGpro many users have found different causes and some where able to fix it but it seems there was no one solution for all of us. I have tried almost everything but as soon as I have more then 4 email accounts mail and accountsd start spiking very rapidly. Updating to 10.15.6 finally seems to have fixed it.

Hello,

I'm using Mac OS Mail since a long time and was trying all alternatives since installing Catalina. Apple Mail was unusable with more than 40 email account and most of them are google accounts. Accountsd daemon take more than 400% of cpu on two different Mac (Macbook Pro 13 2020 ans MacPro 2013).

Reading this thread and after resetting all that can be, I have tried to deactivate iCloud keychain sync and suddenly everything get back to a normal behavior like it was with Mojave.

Will somebody else could try to confirm ?

Spon on! Disabling my Gmail account in the Apple mail.app has GREATLY reduced CPU load.

Adding to this- I have an iMac Pro and once I upgraded to Catalina accountsd hogs almost a gig of ram and my cpu spikes to 400% when mail is open. Making my 5k machine unusable.

I have 5 google accounts, 1 yahoo, 3 exchange, 1 imap, and 1 iCloud.

My work around is to disable the gmail accounts. That fixed it. I am using kiwi for my gmail accounts but this is a drag having to have 2 clients to check important emails.

FYI, the same accounts on my 2011 mbp running high Sierra work like a champ in mail. This is obviously a Catalina issue...

unchecked my icloud / .me account account quit mail restart - bingo - cpu now not egg frying territory... wtaf tho apples own mail service causing the problem? is it possible that icloud mail alone is the culprit anyone else concur? - btw im having issues with icloud docs / desktop sync - once a week maybe more have to turn off and on again or 'no access' wonder if theres a link?

catalina 10.15.1 MBP 15" 2017 16GB RAM 3.1 Quad Core

Alright another clue -

When my CPU goes nutso, I can go to Activity Monitor, select the "Memory" tab, and then sort in descending order in terms of memory usage. After a few days to a week, the "accountsd" process is will over 1.5 GB's in size. I "force kill" that process (it restarts automatically) and all is well for about a week.

Looks like a memory leak in accountsd when using Google mail accounts? Or just some defect that causes "accountsd" to swell. Sometimes I'll see Mail very large too and just restart that. But the accountsd process provides immediate relief.

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.

It is good to have a "Spare Admin" permanently available for disaster recovery. In the absence of any "Mail Reset" function (which you can petition for in a Feature request on apple.com/feedback) then using the spare admin account with your Mail app is the only way to see if you have a corrupt library file. removing all your email accounts will not clean out your ~/Library.

if it does work OK on the spare admin user account then it is a bit of a job to find and delete all the miriad Mail files involved in your proper user account library.

In reading some of the workarounds here - I was going to create the second user account, setting up mail on that account etc (@DocEames and @buymymonkey's solutions), but instead I just logged out of my main MacBook user account and then logged back in. And CPU usage is way down. Lets see how long it stays that way but it seems to work.

So what I'm saying is this: instead of even creating the second user account on your Mac/MacBook, perhaps first try just logging out and then logging back in. See if it helps. It did for me.