Yosemite OS 10.10 Mail Memory Leak

I have to use Activity Monitor because Free Memory updates to infrequently. It still seems to be random. It could be within minutes of opening Mail or 30min. But when it starts jumping, it doesn't stop unless I force-quit in time. If not it locks/hangs the entire system.

Happened again to me... and I think I can isolate this to receiving Google Calendar Invite requests via email. Seems like it started to eat up memory as soon as I started receiving Google Calendar requests.

I'll continue to monitor and see if it happens again when dealing with Google Calendar invites/emails and report back. Got to figure something out here vs shutting down mac mail every few hours. Maybe we should create #LosingMyMemory!

I had the same issue. As soon as I turned Mail on, its memory consumption would grow without bounds, memory pressure went up to the max, little unused RAM available. I tried SMC and PRAM updates. I fixed permissions. Nothing worked.

Then it occurred to me to start Mail in Safe mode.

Hold down Shift while starting Mail. That worked, for me anyway.

I just tried a Google Calendar invite and it worked fine. Ugh. But an independent software developer offered an opinion. He wondered if it's actually something in the new OS that is triggering this memory issue and it just happens to be the Mail.app that's affected. Makes plausible sense.

I apologize because I have never heard of being able to start up individual applications by holding down the shift key. On boot it will disable all extensions and boot into Safe Mode, but never an app, so I tested the theory and the Mail.app started the exact same way but within 5min I had the exact same problem. I don't think there is such a thing as an "individual safe mode" for applications. I could be wrong, but I've never heard of such a thing. I just did a quick search too & couldn't find anything either. Could you please direct us to where you found this information? Thanks!

Here's one:

http://www.macissues.com/2014/10/19/fix-mail-crashing-after-upgrading-to-yosemit e/

Also:

Mail: Mail unexpectedly quits when viewing certain messages

http://www.macworld.com/article/1162877/mail_crashes.html

Might also try:

http://osxdaily.com/2013/08/01/rebuild-mailbox-reindex-messages-mail-mac-os-x/

http://c-command.com/spamsieve/help/how-can-i-rebuild-apple

Thanks Allan!

Ah, I did notice that it's not exactly a "safe mode" like the traditional boot type is. That's why my cross-references searches didn't find anything. This only prevents a Mailbox or a Message from being selected because of a corrupted message. Unfortunately our issue doesn't seem to be related to corrupted messages, that's probably why doing that did nothing for me. And one of the first things I did was Reindex the Mail.app. and I rebuild my Mailboxes a couple times a day already actually so I've tried that as well. Neither had any effect on this issue. This is so frustrating.

I understand about the corrupted messages business. In fact, I don't think that I had an obviously corrupted message at all. I certainly didn't have to track one down and get rid of it. The problem simply went away after I did the Shift start trick. I worked with Mail like that for a while, keeping track of CPU and memory consumption. When nothing else weird happened, I quit and restarted Mail in the normal way. I've had no issues since then.

I had already repaired permissions, etc etc. Whether that was part of the fix in my case, I'm not sure. It does seem like a trivial fix for a gigantic problem though. But that was all I did. Stop Mail while watching it chew up another 20GB of memory and then restart it with the Shift key down. I was about ready to go back to using Entourage, so help me.

Too bad that didn't help. It seemed a treat.

I believe Mail may act the same as Safari and some other apps which when started with the Shift key down, will ignore the "saved state" files that basically tell it what windows were open, where they were located, etc. I tried this (quit Mail and restarted with the Shift key held down) and noticed perhaps the smallest amount of memory for Mail. I suspect this was because it just started.

I simply wanted to pass along what I believe happens when you hold the Shift key while starting at least some apps on the Mac.

We run Apple Mail on 6 iMacs, all different, since updating to Yosemite, we have had Out of Application Memory errors on 4 of the iMacs. We run no email plugins and use IMAP through GoDaddy. We never seen this issue before and it commence immediately after the Yosemite upgrade. Eventually the iMacs lock up if Mail is open when Mail reaches 64 GB of memory usage.

Glad it's not just us... but we need a fix asap. Thanks for sharing BobSz.

I think that's pretty undeniable evidence it's a widespread Yosemite upgrade issue and not just some weird 3rd-party app/plugin coincidence for everyone on this thread. Really appreciate all the comments here, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a solution because this is way out of my wheelhouse. Thanks all.

Yep, its happening to me as well.

Though I haven't been able to pinpoint a cause within Mail. Its definitely Mail causing the problem, but attachments don't seem to trigger it (as some people have mentioned)

Its only when I move away from Mail and start actually working on something else that the warning about system memory pops up. Never had the issue before Yosemite.

MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012)

2.5 GHz Intel Core i5

16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

I'm having the same problem everyone's describing here. Glad I found this thread!

I'm using apple and GoDaddy mail services.

Late 2013 MBP Retina 15", 16GB of RAM.

I've tried the shift-start and rebuild suggestions, and at the moment it's OK.

Just to be really clear, are you saying that your problem was cured by some combination of Shift-starting the Mail app and/or rebuilding mailboxes?

Or does it still happen?