10.8.4 mail high cpu

Have you tried Linc's solution? It really did wonders for me. Also, despite the other issues with Mavericks, I can report that my Mail issues are completely gone under 10.9. No CPU spikes, not even the quick bursts, and no corrupted messages. All the bugs and annoyances in Mavericks are worth it now that my machine is usable again. My laptop is ridiculously more responsive - I feel like I got a new Macbook!

Cthulh:Which is Linc´s solution? Sorry, not sure what you are referring to, please post the link.

Also: I have not upgraded to Mavericks yet. Should I? What are the bugs you are referring to in Mavericks? I am perfectly happy with 10.8.3 so far, except for the high CPU/fan issue caused by Mail...and I do need to use Mail daily, so I really need a fix for this. But if Mavericks causes other bugs...then I am reluctant to upgrade...

Linc's solution of deleting ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Envelope Index etc. is actually towards the start of this thread we are in - I think this link will work: in response to surawuts. I don't want to get OT, but I have not found any issues in Mavericks that would cause me to regret my decision to upgrade. They are small things that do not impact normal usage (see some examples), and the fix for this Mail issue, along with a couple in iMessage, have been most, most welcome.

Thanks a lot for the advice Cthulhu! I now upgraded to Mavericks and the Mail issue seems gone 🙂

I'm so far happy with the upgrade. Your link to the already listed smaller Maverick issues was very helpful!

Cheers for sharing, very much appreciated!

I'm on Mavericks and sadly this issue has just appeared for me for the first time (I never had it on 10.8.4).

I tried Linc's solution of deleting ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Envelope Index but no joy. Mail (Version 7.0 (1822) is still hogging the CPU for no apparent reason at 70% and greater usage.

I'll try the more severe solutions now as well. Hopefully they work. Will report back.

Yes....actually. It reappeared to me too yesterday!!! The CPU jumped to 250% !!! The fan was so loud I thought the laptop will explode. And it was all on Mail. Is someone trying to hack Mail or what is going on? I really dont get it.

I was so happy thinking that the issue was solved... 😟

Well I can add little resume on my current situation.

While Fighting my problems with Mail I came to a conclusion that problem is in my tut.by(gmail.com) account.

I bought Sparrow (little mail client that was purchased by Google lately). Sparrow also has difficulties fetching my mail.

I decided to clean up my mail box. I trashed 85% оf mailbox and left about 200 messages. After that long-long resynchronization both Sparrow and Mail began to work much more stable. But still not stable enough. Looks like both of them receive all messages. Sadly sometimes they don't receive messages at all.

And one more bug. Mail doesn't show red badge with unread messages on the icon anymore, aswell as badges with unread amount in the list of mailboxes. And I know there is an option to show this badge. No, this is a bug.

By the way according to update log (as updates are now automatic) Mail was updated not long ago with some remarks that it should now better work with gmail. Hopefully Apple sees this problem and will solve it eventually

For me I don't use Gmail in Apple Mail but still have the problem.

Like rnolds81, my Mac was crippled by the issue, and I don't go anywhere near Gmail, or Exchange for that matter. I had the iCloud.com account, plus two IMAP accounts.

For those of you experiencing the issue still, do you have any Mail plug-ins (e.g. Attachment Tamer)? Perhaps one of those is having trouble with a particular message.

I know one thing that helped a lot, but did not solve the issue, was to disable the message preview (Preferences->Viewing - set "List Preview" to "None").

I noticed that when Mail.app was trying to decrypt S/MIME messages from Outlook users, it had some significant trouble, but eventually showed the message. Disabling the preview and only decrypting when I really needed to was a big boost. So maybe the encryption/decryption of certificate validation is the issue?

OK I think I fixed it although not sure how because I tried a number of things at once. They were:

• Turning off some mail accounts and re-enabling them (I had one .me account, one imap and two POP accounts).
• Turning off Google address book and .me address book syncing (Address Book app) and enabling again.
• Deleting some smtp servers that I had setup but I wasn't using. (Some had security enabled; some didn't. But I deleted 4 out 6 to leave just the two I do occassionally use still).
• Disabling mail and messages indexing in Spotlight sarh results.

I did all that with Mail running. CPU didn't go down at all. Still at 90%.

But I then quit and relaunched mail (whch I had tried previously without doing all the things above before) and the problem has disappeared (for now at least!). Fingers crossed.

Googling this there are quite a few threads out from people with the same kind of problem. e.g.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5434995

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/290194-apple-mail-high-cpu-usage/

And still more that I didn't read:

https://www.google.ca/search?q=mail+high+cpu&oq=mail+high+cpu

FWIW...I, too, was having the problem of Mail hogging the CPU usage. Called Apple 2/7/14. They had me do an SMC reset. It seemed to fix the problem.

Here's how a Senior advisor told me was the way to do a SMC reset:

Turn computer off. Now, while computer is off and plugged in to power, hold down shift/cntrl/option and then also hold power button for five seconds. Then release all at the same time. The computer should not turn on. If it doesn’t, then the SMC reset was successful. Then you can hit the power button to turn the computer on.

Well, that worked for about an hour. Back to the same problem. Senior Advisor had me capture iinfo to send to the Apple engineers. Maybe I'll know more next week.

I'm running Mail Version 7.2 (1874) on OS X 10.9.2 and getting over 100% cpu on mail. This started suddenly yesterday. Its all going into a thread called "mail web content". I'm on a year 2010 MacBook Air w/ 2.13 ghz Intel core two duo w 4GB of RAM

I deleted the 'sandbox' folder, which helped for several minutes.

I'm slowly working my way through other suggestions, but so far nothing has worked.

Seems like one of the changes I made yesterday had an effect - eliminating mail preview, etc. etc. So far Mail is a well behaved app this morning.