Q: Lag in Typing in Yosemite's Mail w/ External Apple Keyboard

AND THE LAG IS BACK. was gone for first 2 emails i wrote after updating to 10.10.2. but third one (within an hour of updating)...lag. flash of the beachball.

UGH. this is horrible...

Before I got notification of your post, I was going to comment that it seems to me that it gets worse the longer Mail has been running. I have had to reboot a few times recently for unrelated reasons and the lag has been less noticeable but the last time I rebooted was about two days ago and when I was typing an e-mail today, the lag was sometimes about five seconds.

When I've seen the lag go on for more than a stutter, typing another character or hitting Command S seems to wake Mail back up. This leads me to think the delay is not just that Mail is busy, but that it actually stops displaying characters from a buffer.

Also, fwiw, I don't think this problem is related to any particular characters.

My lag is getting progressively worse and now I can type several words before they appear. If I make a mistake, it's a nightmare trying to judge how many backspaces to press and when to start typing again.

One other thing I noticed today is that the reply button now flashes when the SBBoD appears momentarily. At first, I thought it was my imagination but I looked at it as I typed and it was definitely the reply button. No rational reason comes to mind.

i keep trying all sorts of things to troubleshoot this....to no avail. i see the first post here about it is november 1. for me, it started around december 10 (trying to figure out the common denominators). have ruled a lot out, and again, it's fine (so far) in a 'virgin' test user os x account. but otherwise... i keep thinking of moving to Postbox for now...but hate not having all my mail, signatures, etc in the same place. still, the lag is ridiculous.

running clamXav on my mac, on the home folder. just another thing to rule out (it found nothing).

this is the craziest problem i've EVER had with a mac (macuser since 1996).

Still seeing it today.  It does almost look like it's something to do with spelling or interpretation of text.  I also see a lot of chatter to my mail servers I would not expect while typing.  This is really unfortunate, I guess it's back to outlook for me.  I correspond with customers all day long in email, and have sent a bunch of weird typos due to this lag. Anyone else hear anything on the apple front?

As I said earlier in the discussion, I see tiny peaks of network activity when the lags occur but I only have POP accounts so it wouldn't make sense that it is Mail connecting to the mail servers, why would it?

But that said, a couple of days ago, I turned off Wi-Fi, thus isolating my Mac from the internet, and it still happened.

My money is still on it being related to drafts as I suggested a while back. The lag does not occur, for me at least, until the Drafts folder count has increased by one.

My guess would have to be that it has something to do with uploading to iCloud so that Handoff will result in the most recent version of what is being drafted.

I've never experienced this, so it's hard for me to verify anything like that.

I too have tried the suggested fixes with no improvement. Restarting and opening Mail as the first and only open application doesn't help either. At least I know I am not the only one and more important that the keyboard on my MacBook Pro isn't failing. Since I don't use Handoff, I can't blame that. /e/

I don't believe this has anything to do with Handoff, nor iCloud specific email accounts. I've got it (bad) on a Mid-2010 MacBook Pro which doesn't have Bluetooth 4.0 LE, so Handoff isn't an option. And my main email account is an IMAP account hosted by a non-Apple provider.

Since the lag goes away temporarily after saving (using Command-S), I'm also in the camp of this is a Drafts bug. The issue happens when Mail is set to store drafts locally or on the server, so I don't think this is a network/connectivity issue.

Kirk out

I'm new to this thread but so glad I found it as this bug has also been driving me crazy - I have actually given up using mail on my MBPr and using my Android tablet in preference...

I'm of the opinion this bug is related to some sort of spell-checking/text formatting issue going on in the background and IMHO it's also tied in with another similar bug:

If I have the spell checker set to 'check before sending' then I get this really weird text formatting problem where every time I type a word that has an apostrophe ( e.g. don't or won't) the space after that word disappears totally and I get words joining up (don'tforget) or (won'tmiss this bug).

This problem has also been documented in these forums (AFAIK) as a friend had the same problem and he found out that changing the spell-check setting from 'check before sending' to 'check as I type' fixed that problem!

Just why is anybody's guess but IMHO it's tied in with this typing delay we are seeing - some background task is causing the delay and my guess is that it's something like the spell checker or font format/display engine that's holding things up.

Whatever it is it really needs Apple to come up with a fix fast!

Will use the appropriate feedback links - let's hope they are on to it already....

I have just changed my spell checker settings from 'as i type' back to 'when I send' and the delay seems to have *almost* disappeared!

BUT the ridiculous disappearing of a space after a word ending with an apostrophe has now returned BUT this might be the lesser of two evils for me, it's easier to type an extra space when needed than it is to have to wait 5 secs for characters to appear...

Edit - this is the link to the weird *apostrophe* bug:

I would be interested to know if you fellow 'typing lag' sufferers also have this problem?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6636054?start=0&tstart=0

I don't have a problem with apostrophes no matter how I set spell checking. Note that the poster who proposed the solution in that other thread was using a French keyboard layout. Maybe this is a keyboard layout issue. Another possibility is some third party utility or Keyboard Shortcuts trying to respond to an apostrophe.

The lag in typing is so intermittent that it may take several messages (or a lot of typing) to be sure it's gone or even lessened.

Another poster noted seeing the Reply button highlighting. I've never seen that.

I have noticed a lot of to and from server contacts, outgoing and incoming for any e-mail being composed. But when I did a screen movie showing the message window and the activity window, I could not see any relationship between server activity and typing lags.

As I wrote before, I think this should be easy for a developer to figure out if verbose logging of the code can be turned on on a Mac where the problem occurs.

interesting. i've been running the 10.10.2 beta, and my ipod shuffle won't sync. seems a lot of people are having this problem. i reinstalled 10.10.1...and my first 2 emails had no lag. then it came back...

am giving up on this until apple resolves it (i usually like to solve these sort of problems). something in the home library...

Same here, I fixed all my Yosemite problems including these infuriating Mail bugs by going back to my full backup of Mavericks.

I was getting very tired of the bland flatness and spindly fonts anyway...