Apple Mail won't stop Copying Messages for days following Monterey upgrade

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Level 1

12 points

Apple Mail won't stop Copying Messages for days following Monterey upgrade

I have an early 2015 13" MacBook Pro with 8MB of Ram and 256MB SSD. I did an installation of Monterey on an external hard drive to try it out before possibly upgrading the internal hard drive to Monterey if I can make enough space available.

The upgrade was slow and troublesome, but it is now working as expected, except for Apple Mail. I have 34,758 emails in 5 email accounts and would like to delete more of the older ones.

All accounts are online and are able to send and receive email, but everything is very slow. The activity window reports that Mail is "Copying Messages" and has been doing this for 3 days. It is currently stalled at 46,943 of 53,442. Activity Monitor reports that Mail is using 1,002.6MB of RAM, but memory pressure shows a green line about 25%. My whole computer is much slower now than with Mac OS Sierra before the upgrade.

When I've tried to delete many emails it takes several hours to move the emails from the Inbox to the Trash, and several more hours to empty the Deleted Emails. This adds more emails to the total of "Copying Messages".

Should I just keep waiting for Mail to finish copying messages or can I start to delete some more of them? The total emails reported by All Inboxes is 34,759 but there is another new folder now "On My Mac" called "Import" which contains 29,044 emails. I'm not sure why Mail created this folder.

I would like to be able to quickly delete many of the older emails but not current or important ones. My

CPU is showing 89% idle but I'm getting slowdowns and beachballs. How can I stop Mail taking over the machine and get back to normal operation?

MacBook, OS X 10.11

Posted on Mar 21, 2022 12:17 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

James Brickley

Level 5

5,062 points

Mar 21, 2022 7:30 AM in response to mrksg

You stated you booted from an external disk, if that disk is an HDD and not an SSD it will be significantly slower. Are you running Mac OS X Sierra on the internal disk? Dual booting from the external disk for Monterey? Monterey is a bit slower on 2015 MacBook Pros but it sounds more like booting off an external HDD is slowing you down considerably. Yes, running Monterey will demand more of your hardware and can run slower than older operating system versions. It will install and it will run but it may not run nearly as fast as newer hardware. However, it should run rather well even on a 2015 Mac.

There is one Major Concern, do you have the Apple original internal SSD or did you upgrade to a 3rd party SSD? There have been significant issues with Monterey installing on 3rd party SSD's requiring the original Apple SSD in order to install necessary firmware updates so Monterey can fail to upgrade in those scenarios. If you can install the original Apple SSD internal disk, then upgrade to Monterey then swap the drive back to the 3rd party one and upgrade again, that seems to work for those impacted by this complication.

DO NOT UPGRADE TO MONTEREY DIRECTLY FROM SIERRA! That may result in catastrophic problems. That's several (five) operating systems old and making a leap skipping even one version of macOS is dangerous. You should make a full backup with Time Machine of the Sierra system and a full clone backup using SuperDuper or CCC - Carbon Copy Cloner to an external drive. Then proceed to upgrade from Sierra to High Sierra to Mojave to Catalina to Big Sur before attempting to upgrade to Monterey. You can obtain the installers for older macOS versions here: How to get old versions of macOS - Apple Support You should upgrade slowly, ensuring everything works after each upgrade, then making new backups before upgrading to the next subsequent release. If you run into problems you can restore a backup to the previous release. You should buy a few 16GB+ flash drives. Burn the current operating system version to one and the new operating system version to another. This will give you the option of booting easily into the prior release to wipe out and reinstall the previous macOS so you can restore your latest backup. Obviously, this will take time but you haven't been upgrading for 6 years. There have been massive changes to macOS that will break stuff if you make to large a leap, skipping operating system versions. Apple doesn't test upgrading from releases that old. 3rd party software such as security software will definitely cause problems. You should uninstall all of that stuff. Anti-virus, anti-malware, cleaner Apps, etc.

Many software developers and operating system vendors are starting to consider any software older than N-2 (current minus two years) to be beyond support. That means many macOS App developers won't support any macOS version that is more than 2 years old. If you do not keep up-to-date within 2 years of the current OS version not only will Apps cease to be updated or even available but you are not receiving operating system security fixes and that makes your computer vulnerable to being hacked.

Your Mac is 7 years old and that is right about the time when you'll likely have it dropped from support by Apple this fall when the next macOS version after Monterey ships. The 2013 & 2014 MacBook Pros are considered "Vintage" and the 2012 is "Obsolete". Your Mac will likely be considered "Vintage" by Fall 2022. It is time to consider a new Mac. You have perhaps one or two years before you start running into software problems because you won't be able to run the latest macOS. Not to mention you might experience battery problems as the age of the battery is considerable unless you've had it replaced.

The new Apple Silicon M1 processors are running extremely fast compared to the Intel Macs. By next year there won't be any Intel Macs still being sold.

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Answer 2

mrksg Author

Level 1

12 points

Mar 21, 2022 8:44 AM in response to James Brickley

Hi James, thank you for the comprehensive reply. In answer to your points:

Yes I have retained the original Apple SSD for the system and this has not been upgraded beyond Sierra so as to retain compatibility with one particular Intel 32 Bit application, Quicken.
I decided to test an installation of Monterey on an external hard disk so as to learn about it before buying a new MacBook Pro, which I am going to do this week.
I realise 7 years is about end of life for this computer, at least for me to do useful work, but the hardware and Sierra era software have been reliable, so someone else can get some use out of it.
I didn't know about Monterey's problems with 3rd party SSDs, so luckily I didn't change mine.
I didn't know about not upgrading from Sierra to Monterey in one go. Luckily, I chose to do a clean install on the external disk and copy my data over. I have decided not to upgrade the internal drive to Monterey, since the work required would be of no benefit and I'll be moving to a new Mac anyway.
Regarding my performance issues, yes it's now quite clear that the external hard drive is slowing things down. I couldn't afford a large external SSD for this computer and this disk is mainly for backups anyway. I did a fresh TimeMachine backup before starting the Monterey installation also.
Since posting here, I've read about the background processes that run when you install a new operating system. On my old system, this can take several days! I restarted Mail several times and deleted around 12,000 emails. Finally, it has stopped Copying Messages and runs normally. Spotlight was indexing massive amounts of data. Several processes were running at once creating archives as large as 30GB. Obviously, newer systems can handle this resource drain better, but to me that is shocking! After 4 days Spotlight has finally stopped this and only spends a few minutes indexing on each restart.
I'm kind of disappointed in the bloated nature of Monterey. The feel is like the very early days of OS X with Aqua, when everyone was complaining about how resource intensive it was when compared to Mac OS 9 which was a stable, reliable and light (er) weight operating system. I'm having a sense of déjà vu.
I'm praying that Monterey won't feel like this on the new MacBook Pro 16".
I've decided to finally dump Quicken - who were never quick to update their Mac versions and move over to MYOB, which is better and more modern - but it could be expensive. Googling tells me that MYOB won't run on MacOS without a Windows VM. (What's wrong in the world of accounting?!) So this may require Parallels. I may have to hang on to my old machine a bit longer, since it runs Windows 10 in VMware Fusion very comfortably.

Sorry for the long response, but I've been living in a bubble since Sierra and not prepared for the changes I'll have to make to move to ARM based Macs. Your reply was very helpful and provided me with the wake-up call to go do my research before moving to Monterey on the new machine.

Have a great day!

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Answer 3

Mar 21, 2022 9:04 AM in response to mrksg

Running Windows on an Apple Silicon M1 Mac will be problematic. The M1 processors are ARM64 processors and are not X86_64 compatible. So any software you need to keep running will need to be Universal binaries compiled with both ARM64 and x86_64 Intel. Also all software must be 64bit as well, 32bit will no longer work. Otherwise macOS on M1 can use Rosetta 2 to covert the 64bit Intel binary to run on ARM64 but it doesn't work for everything, especially virtualized operating systems. You cannot run x86_64 Windows on an M1 Mac. There are reports of people running Windows ARM with Parallels but that is entirely NOT Supported by Apple nor Microsoft. You could buy a cheap small PC like an Intel NUC and set it up then run it headless and use Microsoft Remote Desktop on your Mac to remotely connect to it to run anything you cannot run on the Mac.

Quicken isn't the only game in town but change will be necessary to adapt to another accounting platform. For basic accounting in the personal sense there are several cloud based online solutions. For small business there are other solutions as opposed to QuickBooks. But again, no competitor is going to be identical to the way Intuit does things.

The new Apple M1 Macs are outstanding, they run very cool and wicked fast. Mind blowing performance, massive battery life and instant on, etc. A considerable improvement all around. It will be like night vs day. The internal SDD's run about 10-15 times faster than what you have now. The RAM is many times faster. The processors are lightning quick. Even the entry level M1 released last year is impressive. The M1 Pro is better and the M1 Max / Ultra are really intended for heavy processing needs that most people really do not need. I would recommend a minimum of 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM on any new purchase to account for future needs.

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Answer 4

mrksg Author

Level 1

12 points

Mar 21, 2022 9:46 AM in response to James Brickley

It seems like there are several options that I'll need to weigh up.

Though I'm not an accountant, I need personal accounting software for my annual taxation return, as well as household budgeting. I'm open to using a cloud based solution if I can be assured of privacy and security considerations. I realise I'll be leaving any 32 Bit Intel software behind.

Thanks for the heads up about Windows for ARM in Parallels. I had assumed that this was supported, so I'll need to look into this more carefully.

VMware have said that they have no plans to move to ARM 64 and Boot Camp is out of the question, so that leaves Parallels or the cloud.

The idea of remotely logging in to a cheap PC is interesting.

All that aside, I am looking forward to running Mac software on the M1 Pro SOC. The performance should be spectacular. I've ordered 16MB of RAM with a 2TB SSD. I just might keep my old MacBook around until after tax time though.

Thanks again.

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