I have mail open and and my CPU usage is between 111- 300% int he activity monitor. It is extremely slow, and bogs down the rest of my machine. The fan is on constantly. I have attempted to Force Quit, Reindex, Remove Accounts, etc.
Anybody else seeing this?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
MacBook Pro Retina
So I finally figured out the issue.
Mail is sending some data to iCloud. If you notice with your Documents and Desktop folders, Catalina makes it so saving to iCloud is a default. The same goes for Mail settings.
Not only is Mail working as it should, accountsd is using substantially less CPU %.
Anyway, this is what worked for me for now.
I am an IT Director for a large company and I can tell you that providing Outlook app is not the norm. That costs extra licensing fees to the organization and in Mac centric companies the norm is to expect the native communications apps to function properly. So please don't allude to the fact that this is some rare edge case situation. Exchange is an email standard just like IMAP and POP. It is by far the most popular business email solution and is supported on all mail clients. Apple knows this issue is a significant pain at the moment and needs to be occasionally reminded that Exchange functionality is not a "nice to have", it's a "NEED TO HAVE".
No issues with mail today after disabling Address book.
Most likely it will spike again.. this is probably the 20th thing ive done that Ive thought worked but ended up not working in the long run. But so far its been5 hours without a spike. usually I have restarted mail 5 times or more by now.
Hi peter_watt,
Yes it is very different for everyone in this discussion.
I have tried so many different combinations of accounts that I can only conclude that for me the issues starts when I have 5 or more accounts active. Currently I'm running 2x exchange, 1x iCloud and 1x imap and that seems to work fine. As soon as I add one more Exchange or imap account it will spike within 5 to 10 minutes when actively using mail.
But as 10.15.5 is still not fixing I will migrate all my mail to Outlook later this week.
After decades time has come to say bye bye Apple Mail :-(
Rgds
Rob
Yes I agree. Doing what @buymymonkey suggests - either manually - meaning you kill the processes via a killall -9 or a cron job works. But it's awful to go through this.
What we are all going through - as evidenced by the frustration on this thread - is simply absurd.
Sometimes the only answer is to "free" the app from the behemoth of a parent. In an unrelated situation - I use Quicken for managing personal finances. Until such time that Quicken was a part of Intuit, the Mac release was always terrible. Buggy, far fewer features, and terrible performance. Then Intuit sold the app and the company that bought it (called Quicken also) is ~150 people. They focus only on Quicken (for Windows, Mac) and the app has improved dramatically.
I wish Apple would just sell Mail and Calendar apps. A startup could do wonders with the app and the accompanying installed base. Of course they would need to charge for the app but it could be a small amount ($25/year). Anyway these are random thoughts!!
Hi all,
Last Wednesday night I upgraded my MBP16 from 10.15.5 to 10.15.6 using the combo updater. So now two day’s later Apple mail with all my 7 email accounts active seems to run fine. Both my mail and accountsd processes are no longer exploding. I will give it a few more day’s to see if this issue is finally fixed!
Rgds
Rob
Knock on wood, I am having a similar experience as Rob - since updating to 10.15.6, I've turned my Mail "back on" to check for mail every minute and so far things have not spiked up. And it usually spiked up immediately. (My solution for the issue was to still use Mail and have CHECK FOR NEW EMAIL set to Manually and it worked fine.). Here's hoping we finally have some resolution....
3+ WEEKS OF NO CPU SPIKES
I've been following this accountsd issue for coming up on a year now. I have not read the comments for about 3 weeks...because my MBP is now stable when it comes to accountsd. Now I have to remember what I did.
For me, hands-down it was Exchange accounts causing it. It started when I added Exchange accounts. Seemed like a memory leak of sorts that happened when Mail was open but didn't have an internet connection...or over time when the MBP was in Sleep.
I removed the Exchange accounts (nothing special was done to remove them. I didn't blow away nested Library folders or anything. I just "-" minus removed them from System Preferences > Internet Accounts) and added them back through Mail > Preferences > Accounts > "+" > "Other Mail Account" Thus, I just added "Mail Accounts". And use the inbound and outbound servers that I Googled for Exchange. I didn't go through the Exchange "wizard" to add it. Basically, I added the mail account like an old school IMAP / SMTP mail account.
The downside is that I did not add the Calendar portion of my Exchange accounts...but I didn't need them. Maybe THOSE can be added Calendar in an old school way like I did with Mail????
This won't work for all because of the missing Calendar component, but I've had zero CPU spikes for nearly a month...heck, maybe longer (I have no sense of time during COVID).
I did just check the Memory for accountsd after literally about 3 weeks of NOT looking. It is getting up there (but not causing CPU overheating), so there is still some form of memory leak but it's taken WEEKS to fill up, rather than days or even hours. I'm going to close Mail and kill accountsd and I should be good for another month!
Hope this helps!
This is still happening for me - CPU for mail app is at least at 130. Every time I open the app to check my mail, my fan fires up. I've tried everything - have switched preferences - reduced my accounts to only my iCloud and decided I would check my gmail account outside of the mail app. What's the point of having it if it makes my computer overheat and freeze up? Feeling discouraged and annoyed. Not impressed. No answers anywhere. My MacBook Pro is less than a year old. WTF.
I got hit with this a few days ago. For me it's about the Google account. If it's added, and I use Mail/contacts/calendar, it will hit accountsd with very high CPU. Nothing seems to help, NVRAM resets, iCloud logout/login... does not help.
Submitted as feedback to Apple today.
I'm considering a full re-install of my MacBook, but it seems that wouldn't even help...
Well, I'm now trying a combination setup:
Right now it's working, no accountsd CPU burning.
Seems like the same old stuff - accountsd going high on CPU, try a bunch of odd things and some may help for a while. There's a core problem here that may not get fixed until Big Sur. At least that's the message I got from their Senior Engineers.
After spending 8 months trying to find the problem, cracking open various configs on my Mac, etc. - and forcing Apple senior engineering to work on my issue (I uploaded logs and logs and logs) I was told by Apple that senior engineers are aware of the issue and plan to have it addressed in Big Sur. That's it - my case was closed, they didn't want to discuss it any further.
I wrote page after page on my blog about things to try. The *only* thing that provided relief was using a cron job to kill accountsd every morning at 2am.
There are still other problems, like how Mac Mail shuffles the orders of the accounts on the left side (I have 6 accounts and keep them in a specific order). So I wrote a script that reshuffles them back.
Basically I'm writing my own workarounds until Apple can come up with solutions. I'm hoping with Big Sur they rewrite Mac Mail.
[Edited by Moderator]
Mesoscales, have you tried the solution suggested by NJFirefighter dated 1 Dec 2019? After I archived my old emails, I note that my available iCloud storage space increased. I may have been bumping against the ceiling of my allotted 5 GB storage.
I've been using OSX since 5 years and never experienced this until 10.15.6. The problem stayed after upgrading to 10.15.7 and became regular. I've tried many of the advices around the net, and the following attempts sometimes helped, sometimes not:
However, the following seems to be more successful even when I am signed in to iCloud: close Safari, then restart OSX.
I have no external mail service assigned. The only thing I know of, google calendar is set to sync with that of OSX. I am not sure if this explains my experience, perhaps somebody else knows the answer.
After disabling all my accounts including O365, Gmail, map en iCloud my Mac was still unusable.
I ran the 10.15.7 Combo updater but that did not help.
I had already rebooted, turn my Mac off and on again and that also did not help.
Than I logged my account off and opened another account with one iCloud account, all options active and that was working just fine. I logged off and logged in into my own account and the accountsd problem was gone.
What I have seen is that when to problem occurred there was a lot of network traffic from my Mac (192.168.13.131) to an internet ip adres from Akaimai (104.73.136.99). The follow sequence was repeating all the time and is now gone:
No. Time Source Destination Protocol Lenghth Info
68 0.282360 192.168.13.131 104.73.136.99 TLSv1.2 121 Application Data
69 0.291182 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=72181 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
70 0.291184 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=73629 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
71 0.291201 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=75077 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
72 0.291422 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=76525 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
73 0.291423 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=77973 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
74 0.291446 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=79421 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
75 0.291668 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=80869 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
76 0.291669 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=82317 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
77 0.291693 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=83765 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
78 0.291709 192.168.13.131 104.73.136.99 TCP 66 49204 → 443 [ACK] Seq=166 Ack=83765 Win=2002 Len=0 TSval=737980846 TSecr=940162055
79 0.291954 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=85213 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
80 0.291956 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=86661 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
81 0.291962 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TLSv1.2 544 Application Data
82 0.292004 192.168.13.131 104.73.136.99 TCP 66 49204 → 443 [ACK] Seq=166 Ack=88587 Win=1995 Len=0 TSval=737980846 TSecr=940162055
83 0.292022 192.168.13.131 104.73.136.99 TCP 66 [TCP Window Update] 49204 → 443 [ACK] Seq=166 Ack=88587 Win=2048 Len=0 TSval=737980846 TSecr=940162055
84 0.292061 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=88587 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
85 0.292198 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=90035 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
86 0.292200 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=91483 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
87 0.292306 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=92931 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
88 0.292431 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TCP 1514 443 → 49204 [ACK] Seq=94379 Ack=166 Win=351 Len=1448 TSval=940162055 TSecr=737980838 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
89 0.292432 104.73.136.99 192.168.13.131 TLSv1.2 493 Application Data
Next time when it happens I will check again the network traffic to see if the same traffic comes back.
Accountsd CPU usage high in macOS Catalina
