Mail under Mountain Lion is painfully slow / unusable

yes, thanks sdpate. I knew someone would figure it out. It was driving me crazy to snowdog1.

Awesome! Worked like a charm 🙂!

Cheers,
Ben

The solution offered by sdpate pointed me in the right direction but didn't quite fix the problem.

Checking the Console messages I noticed an issue with the calendar. I then realised that along with a slow mail.app and mail.app usage of CPU over 100%, an Exchange account on the Calendar was not accepting my password even though it appeared to do so.

I solved the problem by opening the Address Book (Contacts) and in the Preferences noticing that the Exchange acount had been deleted. Restoring the Exchange account fixed my mail problems and the calender problems even though the account existed in these programs and the settings were correct.

This mostly fixed my issue, mail is still not as responsive, but it is useable now.

To clarify the steps should be:

• Close Contacts & Mail if open
• Go to System Prefs > iCloud & Uncheck contacts and choose option to delete from computer (make sure they are synced first)
• Click the Finder icon, click Go in the menu bar & hold Option/Alt and you should see Library appear, click it when it does
• Navigate to Application Support and move the AddressBook folder to the trash
• Attempt to empty trash, if you cannot because it says an AddressBook file is still in use then proceed
• Restart Your Computer
• Empty the trashcan
• Go to System Prefs > iCloud & check contacts to turn synching back on
• Now try it out!

I just installed Mountain Lion after using Lion and had all SORTS of problems with Mail application (freezing, deleted emails would reappear, crashing, etc. etc.). I called Apple Support and they told me to do this, and it works:

shut down

then turn on computer while holding command R

when OS Utilities window comes up go to the top menu bar and click Utilities, then Terminal.

type (all one word, lower case): reset password

hit return

go to the bottom of the reset password window that comes up,

select the HD

then click the Reset button at the bottom under "Reset Home Folder Permission and ACLs"

then wait for it to finish

click the red button to close the finder.

then go to Terminal at top,

Quit Terminal.

Then restart under the apple logo icon.

...This resets the Permissions for all the applications in your computer and refreshes a lot of things that cause bugs, they say....

I just installed Mountain Lion after using Lion and had all SORTS of problems with Mail application (freezing, deleted emails would reappear, crashing, etc. etc.). I called Apple Support and they told me to do this, and it works:

shut down

then turn on computer while holding command R

when OS Utilities window comes up go to the top menu bar and click Utilities, then Terminal.

type (all one word, lower case): reset password

hit return

go to the bottom of the reset password window that comes up,

select the HD

then click the Reset button at the bottom under "Reset Home Folder Permission and ACLs"

then wait for it to finish

click the red button to close the finder.

then go to Terminal at top,

Quit Terminal.

Then restart under the apple logo icon.

...This resets the Permissions for all the applications in your computer and refreshes a lot of things that cause bugs, they say....

This worked for me too.

This worked great. Many thanks !!

No such luck for me. I tried both sdpate's and graphicsluc's solutions several times without success. I even reinstalled ML from scratch, only to have the problem reappear after a few days.

Anyone else still struggling with this?

I'm only having this issue:

"At various times, hitting the mail icon on the dock has no effect. The same is true with Command+TAB"

I've tried all of the previously mentioned suggestions with no luck.

For example, if I'm in Safari and then I click the Mail icon in the dock, Mail will not come up, no matter how many times I hit it. If I'm in a chat window and I see mail in the background, I can click on the Mail window but the chat window stays in the foreground and I cannot get to Mail. Sometimes if I click enough times Mail will finally come up. Same with Alt + Tab.

At various times it works just fine.

Although, if I right click on the mail icon and click on "Inbox" then Mail will appear (sometimes).

I'm seeing the same exact unresponsiveness with the Mail app. I bet if you open the Console app in your Utilities folder you will see this error message every time you try to access Mail:

8/3/12 12:04:27.787 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

8/3/12 12:04:37.190 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

8/3/12 12:04:38.018 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

8/3/12 12:04:39.175 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

8/3/12 12:04:45.585 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

8/3/12 12:04:45.606 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

8/3/12 12:04:53.959 PM sandboxd[6003]: ([5289]) Mail(5289) deny hid-control

I’ve been troubleshooting this for days and nothing I’ve tried has fixed this.

-Steve

After I installed Mountail Lion all seemed fine. If I only had Mail open it worked fine, but as soon as I used any other application and then clicked back into Mail it was unresponsive and behaved oddly for a couple of minutes until it started to work normally. If I then used any other application and clicked back into Mail I had to go through the same tedious period of odd behavior.

I tried getting rid of the Address file as mentioned elsewhere here but that didn't help.

I called Apple and was talked through reconstructing my user identity and it worked. All seemed normal. I turned off the computer at the end of the day and the following day the same problem had returned.

I called Apple and after several very long conversations and trying all sorts of things I was talked through deleting my preferences file whilst signed in as a root user. It worked and is still working, so that was obviously my iMac's problem. It meant that I lost all the settings in my applications so I had to go through each one fiddling to get them as I like, but I lost no data so it was well worth it.

I hope this helps and sorry that I can't give you exact blow by blow keystrokes to solve the problem.

Good luck.

Yes, I see a similar message in Console:

1:27:49 PM sandboxd ([541]) Mail(541) deny hid-control

Good to know.

When I go to reply to an email in Mountain Lion, there is no paper plane send icon to actually send the email. Workaround is to save the email in drafts and then go to send it ,and the icon appears.

Anybody else getting this ?

This worked..!!! I dont know how or why.. but who cares as long as it solved the issue...

I repaired the disk permissions as u suggested.. and my mail is back to speed..!

naren