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Mail on El Capitan

I am experiencing serious trouble wieh the Mail App on El Capitan

on an iMac with 32GB memory.

It grabs way too much memory.

When I had my my accounts activated, it would take all the memory and after

some time the machine would hang.

So I deactivated all my mail accounts and uset Activity Monitor

to monitor memory usage.

Here is a list of what happens (time in seconds)

Before starting mail

time kernel_task Mail

0 1.9GB x

After starting Mail

20 1.9 7.6

80 1.9 7.6

150 21.7 26.9

270 17.7 38.4

520 21.8 57.8

Now closing Mail

555 21.8 x

680 21.8 x

920 17.9 x

960 1.9 x



So Mail really uses all the memory it can get (icluding virtual)

and after closing Mail cleaning up still takes a frew minutes.



I also hav a MacBook Air with 8GB.

Mail works fine on this machine.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4)

Posted on Oct 3, 2015 4:29 AM

Reply
78 replies

Oct 4, 2015 5:06 AM in response to neuwire6

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

Oct 4, 2015 11:01 AM in response to neuwire6

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.

Oct 5, 2015 10:38 AM in response to neuwire6

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.

Oct 7, 2015 2:25 AM in response to neuwire6

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.

Mail on El Capitan

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