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I have several e-mail accounts that I use with Mail on my Mac. One of them is an Exchange account. When I view a mailbox for that account, Mail gets really slow—lots of long pauses and spinning pinwheels. When I switch to a mailbox for a different account or one on my Mac, things go fine. Is there an explanation for this, and is there a way to fix it?
OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3), Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz, 2GB RAM
Did you recently add the account or disable the account? If so, the lagging is due to the cache updating.
Open mail, click on the exchange account inbox and then open activity monitor ( shift-command-0 )
Take a screenshot (shift-command-3), or post what you see
I did not recently add or disable the account.
The Activity window is empty while Mail is slowed down (and nearly frozen).
I have very similar problems too. I have five accounts I use with Mail: 1) Exchange; 2) iCloud; 3) Google IMAP; 4) another Google IMAP and 5) my ISP's IMAP. Two weeks ago, without any change in Mail configuration, Mail started to use up 100% of CPU and computer slowed down to a crawl when Mail window is displaying. Sometimes changing to another inbox speeds up the application, sometimes I heve to quit Mail. After restarting Mail it works fine for a while and everything slows down again.
I removed one inbox I though was the offending account and all worked fine for two weeks. It has just started to act again today. I tried cleaning the sandbox, rebuilding the inboxes, and it didn't work.
HELP PLEASE!
That is EXACTLY what I am experiencing. When you use Activity Monitor, the Mail app is using up all the resoures. It appears to have something to do with Contacts (if you read a bunch of other posts on this same issue). Not sure what is causing it, but Mail is consuming a consistent 90+% of CPU cycles... not only does this make mail useless it makes the machine a dog (unless I shut down Mail).
HELP!
This is not exactly the same as my situation.
When I take an action in Mail—selecting a different mailbox or a different message, for example—the CPU% jumps briefly to between 10 and 20% in most cases. If it's an action that pertains to the account I'm having a problem with (the one Exchange account that I have), then it spikes to 20-40%. But these are spikes, not ongoing usage. Nevertheless, Mail still renders sluggishly when I'm using this account—for example, I click on a message, and nothing happens for a second or two before the message is highlighted in the sidebar and is displayed in the message pane.
I did one thing that helped the performance somewhat, though not completely. I had in the Exchange inbox a large group of messages that were all part of the same conversation—about 90, and each one had an image in it. When I moved this group out of the inbox and onto my Mac, it did improve Mail's reaction time. But it did not eliminate the problem.
You can try this to see if it helps.
You can also try rebuilding the mailbox by selecting it and then go to Mail/Mailbox/Rebuild.
This is what I would do in the following position. Follow it if you want, if not, fine.
What I would do is completely and cleanly delete the mail account, including the local contents on your drive. This only applies to IMAP & IMAP Exchange accounts, since the mail still exists on the server after it is fetched.
1) Delete the account in Mail Preferences > Accounts > Hit the - mark to delete the account. Exit from mail.
2) Under System Preferences > Mail, Calenders, & Contacts > Do the same.
3) Delete all the contents from ~/Library/Mail/ related to the account. "~" denotes the path to YOUR library, not the system. The Full path would be /Users/yourshortusername/Library/Mail/
4) Delete the following:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.mail/
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Container.plist
5) Shutdown your machine. Start it back up.
6) Enter mail and add your account again. Under Mail Preferences >Accounts>Advanced>Keep copies of messages for offline viewing > select "All Messages and their attachments"
7) Leave the mail application open and let it rebuild. If you wish to check the progress, open the "Activity" window under Window > Activity. This process can take hours depending on the size of your mailbox, and mail WILL be slow and unresponsive while it is fetching your mail from the server and rebuilding the cache directory and mailbox. The computer usage of processes such as "mdworker" and "finder" may be elevated as well as the mail is getting indexed.
8) If you let the process complete (you will see no activity in the activity window when done), your mail account will run smoothly again.
The user library nbar is referring to is hidden by default. To reveal it, hold down the option key while using the Finder “Go To Folder” command. Enter ~/Library/
If you prefer to make your user library permanently visible, use the Terminal command found below.
You might want to bookmark the command. I had to use it again after I installed 10.8.4. I have also been informed that if you drag the user library to Finder it will remain visible.
When I upgraded to Mavericks, the problem went away. (I experienced a brand new problem with Mail in Mavericks, but this problem went away.)
Why does Mail slow down when viewing an Exchange account mailbox?
