Memory leak in recentsd and Mail eating up all my RAM

Removing this folder seemed to fix the issue for me, but I'm not sure what this removes. I didn't seem to loose any data with an iCloud Mail account, but your mileage may vary:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.corerecents.recentsd/Data/Library/Recents

Back up all data before proceeding.

1. Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:

~/Library/Mail/Bundles

Right-click or control-click the highlighted line and select

Services ▹ Open

from the contextual menu.* A folder may open, or you may get an error message that the item can't be found. Either result is normal. If the folder does open and has contents, move the contents to the Desktop. Relaunch Mail and test. If there's no change, put the contents of the folder back and quit Mail again.

2. Repeat with this line:

/Library/Mail/Bundles

This time you may be prompted for your administrator login password when you remove the items. Make sure they're removed from the folder and not just copied to the Desktop. If necessary, copy them first and then move the originals to the Trash.

*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. In the Finder, select

Go ▹ Go to Folder...

from the menu bar and paste into the box that opens by pressing command-V. You won't see what you pasted because a line break is included. Press return.

From the Mail menu bar, select

Mail ▹ Preferences... ▹ Accounts ▹ Mailbox Behaviors

and uncheck the box marked

Store draft messages on the server

Do you have a GoDaddy email account?

According to reports, there seems to be a memory leak in Mail 8.0. I don't know what triggers it. I haven't seen it myself. All I can suggest at this point is that you quit and relaunch Mail when you notice that it's taking more than about 500 MB of memory. Maybe a future OS X update will correct the problem.

This is a bug in either Mail.app or recentsd, and I've reported it to Apple (Radar #18610325). The short version is that Mail.app is constantly asking recentsd for recent contacts (duh) but the sqlite query being used has a hard-coded varying timestamp for recency rather than a parameter:

SELECT recents.ROWID,\n recents.bundle_identifier,\n recents.dates,\n recents.display_name,\n recents.sending_address,\n recents.original_source,\n recents.weight,\n recents.group_kind,\n contacts.ROWID,\n contacts.kind,\n contacts.display_name,\n contacts.address\n FROM recents\n JOIN contacts ON contacts.recent_id = recents.ROWID\n WHERE recents.count = 1\n\n AND (kind IN (?)\n AND (cpsearch(contacts.display_name, ?, 5)\n OR icusearch(contacts.address, ?, 2))) AND bundle_identifier IN (?) AND last_date > 1349878830843

Some combination of these processes (recentsd, Mail.app or both) is creating these sqlite queries and never destroying them (some kind of query cache?), and when you look at the continuing memory allocations, they're all the result of sqlite parsing this query over and over.

Somebody from Apple took note of this issue on Twitter the other day, so I think it's under investigation.

Note that you can work around at least the recentsd memory consumption without a restart by, from a Terminal not as root:

launchctl stop com.apple.recentsd

launchctl start com.apple.recentsd

Vacuuming sqlite is unlikely to help with this specific issue. That's for cleaning up the on-disk representation of the data, not its use of memory.

I have the same issue. I've noticed that the iMap ports on my GoDaddy iMap accounts does get set to 143. After I change them back to 993, I notice the same issue and/or the ports get reset again to 143.

I do notice that once I see Compressed Memory (which I never see), it's all over. I have to reboot the machine to re-stabilize it and I no longer can leave mail open.

What's really frustrating is that while composing email, I see this several times during a long composition.

PLEASE APPLE - FIX THIS!!!