Mail Can't Open & com.apple.internetaccount process hogging 100% CPU

Worked!

Just make sure you duplicate your Accounts.plist when you mess with it. I did something wrong at first and had to recover it from Time Machine.

I'm having the same problems, but I'm not tech-savvy enough to know how to:

"

I instead used Text Edit to delete the everything that was between <dict> and </dict> that was repeating."

Would someone be willing to instruct me, please?

Figured it out.

This is the best answer I found since the first day when I upgraded to mavericks.

I tried all other suggestions I could find but the cpu was still easily near 100% usage by all means, UNTIL I found this solution.

I really appreciate your suggestion and solution, which means a lot to me.

Thank you very much!

P.S. to others who may have the same problem, you do not need to reset anything by this solution. Just to delete the repeated emaill accounts (e.g., for me thousands of same hotmail accounts)

With the "thousands of duplicate hotmail accounts" seeming to be a common factor in the Accounts.plist, Im betting that there was a bug in the HTTPMail bundle/plugin that was used to use to enable access to hotmail accounts using Apple's mail client.

Having said that, Mountain Lion obviously handled gargantuan Accounts.plist files better than Mavericks does (although ultimately it is probably a good thing to have discovered and corrected).

Where can I find my Accounts.plist file? I have the same issue.

I've check under:

Macintosh HD/Library/ and I don't even have Mail folder.

Macintosh HD/System/Library and I don't have a Mail folder.

Is it somewhere else?

Brad Skidmore - thank you, thank you, thank you!

After many frustrating, nail shredding, hair pulling hours of watching the Activity Monitor showing two items hogging 99-100% of the CPU at the same time (? 200% ??), I decided to turn to the forums, which I should have done right from the beginning to be honest.

Anywho, after surfing through many threads full of similar vitriol and frustration to my own, but without solutions, I happened across this thread. Your post caught my eye, as I didn't fancy the idea of just deleting the plist and then having to remember the numerous account criteria to get them back again.

So, I duplicated the plist in question and left it as the original master, opened the actual live plist in Textedit and cautiously kept the details for a single account in both the DeliveryAccounts and its corresponding details in the MailAccounts fork.

Save.

Deep breath.

Open Mail whilst looking through fingers.

et voila! success

So, then it was on to identifying th unique instances of the relevantand matching email account criteria for both DeliveryAccounts and MailAccounts and then try again.

It worked.

Beautifully.

Thank you.

PS it too was full of Hotmail duplicates to the value of 75Mb, it's now 35Kb and runs like a dream. 🙂

No need for terminal here just open the go to menu (in the menu bar) and hold the option key. The library folder will appear. Clicking it takes you to the hidden files.

This solution worked for me!

I made a copy of Accounts.plist and then opened the document and deleted repeating content in the file. I saved the file and then opend mail and all my accounts opened fine. I did not have to set up any accounts following this process.

I don't have any Hotmail accounts. I checked my Accounts.plist file (27 KB) and there's nothing repeating there that shouldn't be there. My Mail doesn't show all my messages, and it runs slow as molasses. I have 8 accounts that I have running that I have to maintain.

H.E.L.P.!!

Is it a matter of deleting all the accounts and then reinstalling them?

Another problem is the number of emails I have stored, as well as not being able to empty the trash folder.

It also doesn't show the number of unread emails correctly. As you can see below, it shows I have 4 unread messages, but there are actually 7. At times it shows there are no unread messages, but when I check there are several. This is a whole new problem. Any suggestions??

Maybe force spotlight to re-index your mail:

(The command below is copied from Macworld.com)

Re-index your messages:

Open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities) and type this command, followed by Return:

mdimport -r /System/Library/Spotlight/Mail.mdimporter

It'll take a few minutes to do. Solved some mail search problems for me. Its a good first thing to try as it wont do any harm (as opposed to the radical surgury delete/reinstall account solutions).

Brilliant - 73.3mb Accounts.plist file with thousands of hotmail entries!

Just deleted them in text edit, resaved the file and Mail works properly now 🙂

Brad Skidmore: Tried that and nothing happened.

Seems now all my mail from my main personal email account is landing in the Archive folder. When I get it, that is.

Can I just download the newest version of Mail and try reinstalling it? Would that do any good whatsoever?

Removing and re-adding the accounts via the system preferences -> Internet Accounts setting didn't help. However, as it was said here, I was able to solve the problem by first removing the account, then removing manually the folders inside ~//Library/Mail/V2 and also removing the accounts from the ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Accounts.plist file. I also removed the AvailableFeeds* files. So I am not sure, what exactly solved it, but it seems to be a caching issue.