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.
Hi @nacsak I have iCloud Keychain sync alway's turned off and was having the problem. For me and some other the update to 10.15.6 was the fix.
10.15.6 fixed the CPU usage for me across the board. I have Apple Mail with Office 365, iCloud and Google Mail accounts. I haven't disabled anything else.
Disabling and re-enabling my Gmail account resolved the issue for a short time, but the issue returned.
I finally disabled my Gmail account as it was unworkable running mail.
Disabling my Gmail account has allowed me to use mail without the cpu running wild.
I am not sure what the root cause is, but I have 8 email accounts with numerous email services and I have narrowed it down to an issue with my Gmail account.
Try this - set your gmail to check for new email every minute rather than "Automatically". Not a great solution but seems to temper the accountsd CPU issue - or at least make it intermittent.
This can be found under -> Mail -> Preferences -> General ... The second drop down on the screen. It at least allows me to use my Mac and Mail without sluggishness (much).
I tried disabling Gmail. That did not work. Then, I quit Mail, force-quit accountsd and started Mail again. Hours later CPU is back to normal. I can't believe it was this simple, and I know it did not work for some people. Hopefully it stay this way.
AGREED. I don't think the root cause has been found yet. I do note that my accountsd process still expands to 2GB+, which is the largest memory user on my system - bigger than the windowing daemon which handles all of OS X's windowing processes.
I think that as this memory usage grows bigger, it has to swap parts of accountsd (or maybe other processes) out to disk and back, which causes a CPU spike. I only say this because if you (again) kill accountsd, it resets and is much smaller (100MB) and everything settles down for a week or so.
Sure sounds like a memory leak or logic error that caches too much.
Open Console and filter down to suggestd
See if everyone is getting a bunch of these. I also filtered for mail since there are millions of entries from suggestd.
default 22:51:10.959528-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityExtractionPlugin: deleting named entities and locations from com.apple.mail for 6 documents: <private>
default 22:51:10.962651-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: deleting topics from com.apple.mail for 6 documents: <private>
default 22:51:10.978250-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityPlugin: <private> from com.apple.mail is rejected.
default 22:51:10.978317-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: not extracting topics from <private> (com.apple.mail is not a relevant bundle Id)
default 22:51:10.978951-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityPlugin: <private> from com.apple.mail is rejected.
default 22:51:10.978995-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: not extracting topics from <private> (com.apple.mail is not a relevant bundle Id)
default 22:51:11.273006-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityPlugin: <private> from com.apple.mail is rejected.
default 22:51:11.273235-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: not extracting topics from <private> (com.apple.mail is not a relevant bundle Id)
default 22:51:11.274597-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityPlugin: <private> from com.apple.mail is rejected.
default 22:51:11.274710-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: not extracting topics from <private> (com.apple.mail is not a relevant bundle Id)
default 22:51:24.723980-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityPlugin: <private> from com.apple.mail is rejected.
default 22:51:24.724035-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: not extracting topics from <private> (com.apple.mail is not a relevant bundle Id)
default 22:51:24.725493-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityPlugin: <private> from com.apple.mail is rejected.
default 22:51:24.725537-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: not extracting topics from <private> (com.apple.mail is not a relevant bundle Id)
default 22:51:29.668513-0800 suggestd Received 6 items from com.apple.mail.
default 22:51:30.180473-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityPlugin: <private> from com.apple.mail is rejected.
default 22:51:30.180550-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: not extracting topics from <private> (com.apple.mail is not a relevant bundle Id)
default 22:51:30.201631-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityPlugin: <private> from com.apple.mail is rejected.
default 22:51:30.201761-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: not extracting topics from <private> (com.apple.mail is not a relevant bundle Id)
default 22:51:33.010623-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityExtractionPlugin: deleting named entities and locations from com.apple.mail for 6 documents: <private>
default 22:51:33.013498-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: deleting topics from com.apple.mail for 6 documents: <private>
default 22:51:33.017252-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityPlugin: <private> from com.apple.mail is rejected.
default 22:51:33.017292-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: not extracting topics from <private> (com.apple.mail is not a relevant bundle Id)
default 22:51:33.021404-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityDissector dissecting <private> from com.apple.mail
default 22:51:40.081710-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityPlugin: <private> from com.apple.mail is rejected.
default 22:51:40.081922-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: not extracting topics from <private> (com.apple.mail is not a relevant bundle Id)
default 22:51:40.082750-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityPlugin: <private> from com.apple.mail is rejected.
default 22:51:40.082875-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: not extracting topics from <private> (com.apple.mail is not a relevant bundle Id)
default 22:51:40.119514-0800 suggestd SGNamedEntityPlugin: <private> from com.apple.mail is rejected.
default 22:51:40.119648-0800 suggestd SGTopicExtractionPlugin: not extracting topics from <private> (com.apple.mail is not a relevant bundle Id)
6.5 hours later with my Exchange Accounts OFF, and Gmail + Ymail Accounts ON. No CPU spikes. Again, I don't know how to "fix" it but Mail hasn't run this smooth in months.
I'm going to try to turn on just the Mail for the Exchange Accounts and leave the Contacts OFF to test this Address Book Sync theory. Stay tuned...
I found a solution that work like a charm for me. Easy too.
I went to the keychain app, and deleted all keychains that were empty. I follow this article:
https://buymymonkey.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/osx-catalina-cpu-spike-checking-mail-after-upgrade/
I read and tried ALL of the many solutions I found online during the past week I am having this problem since, and not a single one of them worked.
What finally worked for me (no audible fan noise anymore, no lags in Mail, no accountsd on top of the activity monitor list at 400%) was:
1) go to user/library/keychains and move the folder with the long string of uppercase letters as a name to another place
2) restart
3) start Apple Mail. It will now ask for the login passwords for al Email accounts. At first I entered them and wondered why non was accepted although they were all correct. After the tenth I just hit 'Cancel' each time. I got a bit frustreted that this 'fix' wouldn't work because apparently there was something in this folder that the system couldn't restore by itself. So I knew I had to restart and put this folder back and keep looking for other solutions.
4) so I restarted and put the old folder back to its original position (overwriting the new one) and
5) restarted and started Apple mail expecting the fan to go wild and Apple Mail becoming unresponsive within seconds. But all of a sudden, all was fine. None of those errors happened anymore. One week of endless trouble had finally come to a good end. Really hope this fix may help others too!
I have a similar situation here on iMac Pro 3GHz 10-Core running OS X 10.15.4. 2 email accounts. 1 iCloud, 1 Exchange. accountsd seems to calm down on a sort of regular cycle depending on what I'm doing. It looks like it gets up to about 340% of CPU and stays there for about 45 seconds, then goes down to 0 and stays there for about 15 seconds, then shoots right back up to 340% roughly. It's not really consistent in that pattern though.
All of those CPU peaks and sustained highs are caused by accountsd with Mail and Safari open. The drop and sustained low at about 3/4ths in is where I closed Mail. Within a few minutes after closing Mail, even after re-opening Messages, CPU load from accountsd remains completely flat at near 0%. Just re-opening Mail does not cause the issue. You have to actually be active in Mail I believe to make it go crazy.
But all of this is just noise. I don't really understand why there hasn't been someone start a class-action lawsuit against Apple over this. I paid a lot of money for this setup and, with accountsd clearly being responsible for system-level behavior and consuming so much of available CPU most of the time, my experience becomes more akin to using a Windows box with 80 malware programs stealing CPU. Obviously Apple is aware of the problem. I don't know why they don't respond on this board, and I don't know why they don't fix the problem. It's unacceptable.
Amen, Exchange is a standard... for example, AWS (Amazon Web Services) Work Mail and SES both use Exchange. This is not a Microsoft only issue. Exchange built into iOS and macOS is a major selling point to businesses for security. This is a problem for Apple to fix.
One thing I've noticed recently, I can enable my Exchange accounts, instantly get email and everything fluid for a couple minutes or so. It takes about 5 minutes and then the accounted process ratchets up to 450% making Mail unusable. Take the Exchange accounts offline, and accounted process drops almost instantly. What is interesting is the email comes in initially, there is no error and its fast. So it's clearly not the Mail app or email per se, but major exception codes being thrown by the accountsd process, whatever it is supposed to do.
I would encourage those having this issue, to setup the email account under a newly created user on the same machine... see if the same issue occurs. This will help narrow the troubleshooting of what is going on.
"...This is a problem for Apple to fix...."
"...I would encourage those having this issue, to setup the email account under a newly created user on the same machine.."
Two incompatible views. Either it is a general bug or it is a corrupt user setting.
The lack of a "Reset user library settings" is still a major omission in MacOS, so if the new user account eliminates the problem, moving your stuff to a new user account remains the best option.
One of these days I will delete my entire ~/Library contents and see if it regenerates clean. Not recommending it though.
Oke since I also disabled in my 3 Exchange accounts the account option "automatically connection setting" my mail is running as normal with all my 6 accounts active. Seems hopeful this finally fixes it for me. But let be patience as I just changed it approx 4 hours ago and let see what it does after a day or two.
I doubt it's a single problem that people on this thread describe. My issue resolved when I stopped using Mail, returned when I resumed Mail, and stopped again -- permanently, it seems -- when I archived old emails. Some in this chain have had a similar experience, and others have had a different experience. Your problem seems not directly related to Mail. That implies there's more than one problem with a similar symptom.
Accountsd CPU usage high in macOS Catalina
