Yosemite OS 10.10 Mail Memory Leak

I'm also experiencing this relatively crippling problem. I'm also using a GoDaddy IMAP account. Here is my hunch: it is my perception that GoDaddy's mail solution is pretty flaky, so I'm not particularly happy with them either. I regularly get errors (prior to Yosemite) saying their ingoing or outgoing servers aren't responding, I can't connect, etc. etc. My hunch is that there is something new in Yosemite's Mac mail that is leaking memory under some error condition. So it could happen to almost anyone, but if you use GoDaddy and their mail is indeed unreliable, then you're much more likely to trigger the error condition that makes it leak like crazy. I haven't yet tried the solution of not saving drafts on the server, but given that drafts get saved really often, I could speculate that saving drafts on the server just leads to many more attempts to connect to GoDaddy, making it much more likely to hit the error condition.

Thanks to everyone that has been doing sleuthing trying to find workarounds. I'll try not saving drafts on the server. My suspicion is that GoDaddy needs to make their servers more reliable, and Apple needs to not leak in the face of error conditions. But I'm guessing to some extent.

I upgraded to Yosemite last Wednesday (October 22) but started experiencing the Force Quit / Out of Memory errors a few days ago (Monday, October 27). After checking Activity Monitor, it was easy to see that it was indeed Mail.app causing this issue, with its memory usage showing 64.19GB. It's been an inconsistent timing of these errors, and, of course, never at the right time.

Anyway, yesterday I tried the steps outlined in the "Guide: How to solve Yosemite memory leaks and CPU usage" post by Luis_Mercado here in Apple Support Communities. These steps included Booting in Safe Mode, Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC), and Resetting the PRAM. I had hopes that Luis' guide would work, but unfortunately, the Force Quit / Out of Memory errors persisted today. While Luis' post didn't correct my issues, it may help others, which is why I am referencing it for others to try.

So with a scheduled call with Apple Support tomorrow morning, I went in search of anything else I may try in the interim. I came across this other thread here in Apple Support Communities, "Re: Yosemite mail memory leak?," that mentioned a potential correlation to those using GoDaddy IMAP accounts. (Subsequently, it was that thread that led me to search for terms "GoDaddy IMAP AND Mail.app memory leak" that led me to this thread.)

It was java_4_me's post in the Re: Yosemite mail memory leak? thread that prompted me to go check my IMAP incoming port settings for my 4 GoDaddy accounts in Mail.app. Turns out that the upgrade to Yosemite must have reverted my port settings back to 143, while leaving the 'Use SSL' checkbox checked, all unbeknownst to me. So I went back and changed the ports to 993 and so far, after 4+ hours, Mail.app has been behaving at around 89-90MB and stable. Far cry from the 64.19GB that it was getting up to earlier today and intermittently since troubles began on Monday. And it's currently longer than any stretch I've been able to go without issue.

My fingers are crossed. I definitely know I was using port 993 on Mavericks. Curious if anyone else with a GoDaddy IMAP account (or any IMAP account) has checked their incoming SSL port settings since the upgrade.

BTW, I have not attempted the suggested fix from this thread about unchecking the 'Store draft messages on the server' checkbox. It has remained check, as it was on Mavericks before the upgrade. Neither have I tried changing the 'Check for new messages' setting from Automatically.

I'll post back in the next 24 and 48 hours to let others know if the issue has repeated or if I may have found another fix to the bugginess.

This was my experience also. I know the ports were configured to GoDaddy recommendations prior to the upgrade. Correcting this and disabling the save of drafts to the server has solved the problem for me. I was topping out at 70GB in the mail app, with secondary lockups of other applications due to resource issues. It was happening pretty regularly and hasn't happened since the changes were made (12hrs).

nctechnologeek, great post.

I did a clean install last weekend after experiencing everything you're describing (almost exactly.) When you mentioned your port settings in Mail.app being reverted, it dawned on me that this was also the case for me. It was one of the first things I checked and completely forgot about because I had to leave the problem alone for several days. The clean install allowed me to completely reset Mail.app the way it should be (I've had zero problems thus far, in fact, the entire system is working better than ever, thankfully.) It doesn't help that GoDaddy's IMAP setup page has outdated info...what a mess. Anyway, great post, thanks.

Yeah, I was kind of looking for any and all options short of the nuclear "format and clean install" option that I've been anticipating will be the Apple Support answer on my scheduled call in the morning. I know that everything should work well after a clean install, but my machine is not that old and I didn't want to give up my weekend to do that and then restore from backup.

Anyway, I'm hopeful this will continue to work. I'll leave Mail.app running overnight and up until my call with Apple. Would love to tell them the port settings being reverted may be an item to address as a bug fix and add it to their troubleshooting steps, versus telling people that it's likely a 3rd-party Mail.app plugin (of which I had none) or that people need to just clean install Yosemite and start over.

The port setting is definitely interesting. The weird thing for me is that I actually have configured two different GoDaddy IMAP accounts. One was reset, and the other was not.

After your post I checked my settings, but my Mail settings had not changed. My port still said 993 and 'use SSL' was still checked. I do have a GoDaddy account. That said, since I unchecked 'save drafts to server' yesterday I have had no issues - and I was having issues multiple times a day beforehand.

Again, FWIW....I was contacted by the Apple bug tracking folks who indicated my post about Mail memory leak was a duplicate of another and they were going to close mine.

In spite of the above, I had re-enabled "Save drafts..." for my GoDaddy account and had not had any problems for about half a day until just about 15 minutes ago. Mail was up to 55GB and the kernel was up to 9.5GB. I tried to run System Diagnostics to send the data to Apple just in case they were interested, but gave up after 15 minutes of ~12GB of memory and nothing apparently happening. This certainly seems to support the claim that it's somewhere between GoDaddy and Apple, but Apple should never let it run away as it does.

Once I killed Mail and turned off "Save drafts..." the system had returned to normal (no logoff or reboot involved). I doubt I'll re-enable "Save drafts..." until I'm sure the issue is resolved. I guess I'm not even sure why I'd ever want to re-enable it.

Thanks for the post. I also have a GoDaddy imap account. However, i checked the account and the port was still set to 993 (so no switch after upgrade). This is pretty frustrating.

And for those that suggest turning off "save drafts", the automatic save feature is the only thing that has kept me from throwing my MBA at the wall! It has preserved the emails I was working on when the Mail app "pauses", requiring a Force Quit.

Dear Goldmind,

I suggest you try "turning off" "save DRAFTS". This eliminated the crashing of mail for me. I only turned Save Drafts "OFF" on my GoDaddy account. I left it "ON" for my other 3 accounts. The crashing "application out of memory" errors are GONE. Yosemite is now stable on both of my machines.

Hope this helps.

I too have had this problem every day since upgrading to Mavericks (two weeks now). Someone on one of these posts mentioned going into System Library and cleaning out your Startup Items. That seemed to make sense. I've wondered over the years how Migration Manager can manage to avoid bringing crap you don't need on the new machine - over from the old. The answer is that it doesn't weed out the old - it just brings everything. Including in some cases, whatever problems you were having on your old machine.

Strangely enough their weren't any items in my System>Library>Startup Items folder - but I went out to the other Libraries and found several items (graphic attached). Some of this stuff was from 2006. Two days later, so far, so good.

I put everything into a folder called StartupItems (Disabled).

I'll post again if it comes back. But so far everything I do is faster and I also haven't seen the SBBoD in days!

I'm feeling it. I have tried all suggestions, except for driving to Yosemite and jumping off Half Dome.

Yes that's Mail under the "Force a a process to quit" pop up...

As the rest of you, I have the memory issue. Here are a couple images to help document it.

I am on a MacBook Pro 16GB (768SSD) retina.

I also have found that since the upgrade to Yosemite, Dropbox gives a crash report (still functions) and now Finder gives a crash report. The image for this is bad because I did a video to show what was happening and I had to do a screen grab of a paused video.

Note that when Mail was crashing, I heard the fans spinning up and grabbed a shot of the temp sensors for the machine.

I also noticed that when Mail tried to connect to my GoDaddy IMAP servers, I get a "certificate for this server is invalid" error from (image below too).

I have tried to scrubbed the SMC and PRAM per a suggestion online, but I am seeing problems. The show stopper one is Mail. I just switched over to Mail a couple of weeks ago after being on Thunderbird for almost two years. As if it wasn't hard enough to accept the more limited functionality Mac Mail....now this.

Can someone make this a sticky post when a solution is found?

Thanks.

I turned off "Store draft messages on server" last Tuesday and I have had no problems since. This after getting the problem multiple times a day for a week and a half prior.

So as crazy as this sounds, the fix kisertn gave ( turn off "Store draft messages on server") on every IMAP account works great!!!! It's been almost an hour and Mail is at 320MB...awesome!!!

It does not address the issues with Dropbox or Finder (that I know of...maybe it does), but it seems to help Mail for now. Will update if that changes.

-Kirk