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neuwire6 Author

Level 1

7 points

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

78 replies

Oct 10, 2015 8:13 PM in response to miguel.apple

Thank you so much - this was extremely helpful!! You gave me my Mac back!!!

Oct 11, 2015 8:05 PM in response to miguel.apple

Thanks a lot. I have delete about 10GB log file. Now, mail seems back to normal.

Oct 12, 2015 11:26 AM in response to neuwire6

Great! Thanks for this solution. It solved my problem too. Although I'm worried, because it seems that the default log level is set to debug. I guess it is just a matter of time before these log files grow again. Is there a way to set the log level to a less detailed level. This should drastically reduce the amount of log messages.

femp

Level 1

10 points

Oct 12, 2015 1:08 PM in response to miguel.apple

I did it but the day after I had the same issue

Oct 12, 2015 1:31 PM in response to femp

Check the largest log file and see what's being logged, there's probably something unusual going on.

Greg

borako

Level 1

4 points

Oct 12, 2015 3:18 PM in response to femp

femp, one of my previous posts says the similar experience I've had with an Exchange account. I couldn't find anything in the log file, just seemed to log everything. Deleting that Exchange account and re-adding it solved the problem for me.

Oct 12, 2015 11:11 PM in response to EPage_Ed

i have the same iMac retina 27 32gb and i also have the same identical problem

Oct 13, 2015 8:50 AM in response to borako

Seems like i had the same problem, almost 96GB of Log files, deleted them all and problem solved. Thks.

Oct 14, 2015 12:09 PM in response to miguel.apple

Do I delete the zip files there too? There are 4 there and those alone are taking up about 80 GB

Oct 15, 2015 12:43 PM in response to miguel.apple

This fixed me up to. Many thanks!

Oct 18, 2015 6:37 AM in response to mlennox81

These are usually previous logs that were compressed. Personally I deleted everything.

JTF

Level 1

41 points

Oct 19, 2015 11:40 AM in response to miguel.apple

Hi Miguel...

Just wanted to mention first that, yep, this also worked for me. And was hugely helpful. Just ahead of finding this solution, I'd gone from about 30 GB of free space on my hard drive... down to 49 mb. The fan was flying and I could barely move the cursor without getting a spinning beach ball.

So... Miguel... thank you.

Deleting the logs definitely did the trick.

Now, next up: I still can't use Mail. When I open it, it starts checking for mail and finds something like 1,000+ emails it wants to download. I'm nowhere near popular enough to think that's real ; )

I suspect it has something to do with me trying to rebuild the inbox, ahead of finding Miguel's solution, which had about 600 or so emails sitting there. But I'm afraid if I let it run, it's going to build a massive log file again and we'll be back where we started.

Is this an out-of-control process I'll need to wait for the next update to fix? Or something I can manually halt now?

Meanwhile, I'm checking mail by using icloud.com online instead... seems safer.

Oct 19, 2015 12:46 PM in response to JTF

Hello,

same for me... the log file is growing again.

I have several accounts, all of them IMAP. But Mail is not downloading messages.

Only deleting and readding an account looks to work for few minutes. Then Mail simply stops downloading the new messages.

I am using Outlook 2016 in the meantime, hoping for a fix from Apple.

Other colleagues using different computers in the office do not have problems.

This is very very bad...

Oct 19, 2015 2:05 PM in response to neuwire6

I upgraded to El Capitan yesterday & my Mail had an error initially & then was reloading everything. Now Mil opens OK, brings in new messages but crashes after about 5 seconds. I have looked at the workaround listed - but as I have never looked at these file s before I want to make sure I'm doing something OK. FYI - my .log feels aren't that big -- kb's or MB's ...... So there bunch of files dated today xxxxx.log and then several zip files from the last few days that are date_logs.zip. Should all these files be removed, or ?????

Thanks for help

Oct 19, 2015 2:10 PM in response to Jan Hetherington

I'd try either rebuilding the mail or deleting all mail cache (provided that you have an imap account) and let it re-download it.

Mail on El Capitan