Mail on El Capitan

There is no such file on my Macbook Pro under El Capitan.

My problem is that I have a huge accumulation of old emails and I can't delete them. The debug log file sounds like the right problem, but I can't find any such file.

I have a very similar issue after upgrade to El Capitan, leaving Mail running resulted in a "Your system has run out of application memory" error

I have noticed that Mail generates an enormous amount of disk activity, several 10's of GBs read and the whole machine grinds to a halt.

This problem only seems to happen on my login, not on other users of the same Mac. I do have a handful of different email accounts configured.

iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2011), 8Gb memory

I started seeing the same issue on El Capitan. iMac 27" Retina, 32 GB of RAM. Doesn't take long after launching Mail that it takes up all the RAM and/or 30-40 GB of Swap. Quit Mail and the system returns to "normal". I have a few email accounts but everything ran fine under Yosemite. I didn't notice the problem in the first few days of using El Capitan, but now I can't use Mail.

EPage_Ed has a good point - my mail was all good for a day or so before going all hungry.

[edit] Luckily I still had Thunderbird installed!

Going to have weigh in that Mail did seem to be working fine on El Capitan for the first few days, then became unusable. Tried disabling mail accounts other than my main iCloud account through Settings but that doesn't seem to help. The kernel_task also seems to start grabbing RAM too. I have 32GB of RAM on an iMac.

I am having the same problem. Mail is hogging all of my memory. What's happening Apple?

Rebooted and still experiencing the issue. On launch Mail starts eating up all the RAM (32 GB machine).

I really hope they are aware about this problem, that makes Apple mail not usable. I am now using Outlook 2016, but it is a pain...

Same issue here. First day was fine, then suddenly system runs out of memory. Looking at Activity Monitor the mail takes all available memory including virtual so next came "your hard disk is low on space" message. This on 2013 Macbook pro 15". Strangely 2011 Macbook Pro 13" seems to be fine (including similar number of accounts). Using Outlook for now until this problem is fixed.

I'm in the same boat.

I disconnected all accounts from Mail

I moved Library/Mail out of the way.

I made sure there were no bundles linked to Mail (/Library/Mail and ~/Library/Mail)

Mail still grows at an amazing pace until it consumed all memory in my Mac Mini (8GB)

If anyone hears of a solution, I'll be extremely happy.

Filed a bug report with Apple. Forced to use Thunderbird for now.

Same problem here. It's taking memory until Mac crashes. It used to work for the first few days. So frustrating.

Same problem Here

MacbookPro Retina 15' (First generation) with 16GB RAM

Mail is using 34GB RAM

Kernel Task 8.9GB RAM

My current Swap usage is 24GB (Before reboot it was 48GB)

I find that the new Mail app in El Capitan is trying to clean up the log files by zipping them in memory which caused the problem.

Try to delete your log file manually in the following folder (Command + Shift + G):

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Logs/Mail/

You may see huge size log files in the folder ...just delete all *.log and restart your Mail App. Then, things should back to normal.