Accountsd CPU usage high in macOS Catalina

I have been experiencing this extremely frustrating problem too.

I have had to change away from using Mac Mail to solve the issue - hopefully this wont have to be a permanent fix.

The issue seems to be caused by my Gmail accounts.

Agreed. I'm currently using MS Outlook, a little awkward but it works with all my email accounts from Exchange, iCloud and Gmail accounts. Mac Calendar is working fine with all accounts, including Gmail.

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?

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've suspected it is the several POP accounts I have that's causing this. Some of them are no longer active (but I keep them for the mail archives) which I am certain doesn't help. This was never a problem with earlier versions of macOS mail.

same problem, unfortunately your solution doesn’t work (and what the heck is mail doing anyway storing things in iCloud? Shouldn’t IMAP store anything Mail requires in the first place?)

given the different hacks that worked for different people but not others, it would seem they try to sync accounts between devices, but if there are some inconsistencies, things go bonkers.

Typical Apple assumption: everything “just works” (until it doesn’t), and thus users have no control.

Do I miss the days of human readable settings files, that if need be one could edit and fix.

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.

Yes I was confused for a moment and erased my response.

It only helps if you don't want to use your apple mail account. Mine is turned on but with no problems even though I don't use the account. But the account does exist.

It has to be more complex than it appears, like the Apple account in question cannot handle mail or only exists as an alias.

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.

I think there are a number of issues at play here. I don’t use (and never have used) an iCloud email account and yet the problem surfaced for me. With all of the things I’ve changed, it’s a lot better. I only have to kill the accountsd process once a week or so - or whenever it acts up. So it could be a couple of things that are causing this issue.

It's not how I usually do things, even ashamed to admit, but due to being sick etc I just rolled with it and it sortof fixed itself after some time, maybe I accidentally changed something, but desktop and documents are being synced via icloud, also when I set my old laptop running High Sierra to sync desktop via icloud, it also attempted to lift off from my table for about 24 hours, might be something else, might be coincidence too

I took out gmail accounts and did fetch mail every 5 minutes . that helped a little. What helped a lot was the answer from apple :

(It fixed the issue for me)

Have you checked that filvault is off? That could be the issue right there. When filevault is enabled ALL of your files are encrypted so every time email comes through the files are encrypted as they come in and it can eat up a lot of CPU power especially if you have a lot of email accounts. Go to system preferences, security and privacy then FileVault . Once it's turned off, it will take a while for all of the files to decrypt. In about a day.. depending on the amount of data you have.. you will start seeing that usage slow for sure. I would also restart your machine as well.

My account sd went from 144 to 4.5 and my mail is working fine now... I'm going to readd my gmails now and see if that fixed the issues as well...

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.