Lion mail.app memory leak?

New MBP, 120 GB SSD, 4GB DRAM, 20 GB free space on SSD. Boot up, run mail.app. Mail.app continues to take more DRAM and swap space on drive until I get a message that the hard drive is full and looking at memory resources I can see that mail.app is at maximum DRAM usage. I then have to quit mail and reboot. Mail is behaving erratically, some of the messages open blank. If I quit mail and reopen they are displayed correctly. Some messages apparently don't send. But if I look at the Sent mailbox there they are, sent. Back in the main window the message is still on my screen as I composed it. If I dismiss it it states that I am erasing the message, but again, the messages are filed properly under sent. I have been using Macs since 1989. I know my way around a fair bit. I conclude from the posts here that there are serious problems with memory usage in Lion. My real question is: when will Apple post a fix and get it into distribution?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.2), 4GB, 120GB SSD

Posted on Nov 1, 2011 7:12 AM

17 replies

nikrosa

Level 1

8 points

Apr 17, 2012 6:07 AM in response to eezerdude

I've got the same issue and last night the issue ate up 60GB of disk space as virtual memory!

Indeed it seems that toggling off "Show Related Messages" resolves the issue. Were you able to make any further progress? That was a feature I quite often enjoyed!

HHChuck

Level 1

0 points

Jul 16, 2012 1:59 PM in response to eezerdude

I have a Mac Pro with 10.7.4 and 8GB of RAM connecting to several Exchange 2010 accounts. I experienced the same symptom with the Mail.app's memory consumption and its regularly consuming 2GB of active memory within a couple of hours — and once up to 5.5 GB of memory.

Since the setting can be applied separately to mailboxes, I unchecked "Organize by Conversation" for each and every mailbox (including Drafts, Sent, Trash, and Junk mailboxes as well as custom mailboxes I use to locally archive messages). Restarted Mail and it has sustained active memory of <200MB now for several hours. This is even after re-enabling "Organize by Conversation" on my primary mailbox inbox now, too. "Includes Related Messages" in the Viewing tab of the app's settings was also disabled.

I'll also toggle the "Include Related Messages" setting in the app's settings to see if that contributes to the memory issue, but so far it's behaving like I've always wanted it to.

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Lion mail.app memory leak?