High Mail CPU with El Capitan

For those of us who don't use any of the (usually troublesome, rarely useful) anti-virus stuff... When you are seeing lots of Mail CPU what do you see when you look at Mail, Window, Activity (or option-commmand -zero)?

First "Checking for Mail", and when that goes away it says "Downloading messages: Downloading 151 new messages". The actual number is different each time.

Chroot, this seemed to cure the problem I'm having with Apple mail and the IMAP cloud account, I've narrowed it down to that. I deleted the log per your instructions and restarted mail, the CPU for mail was way far down the list insignificant, the drain on the battery was almost zero, no impact. So I thought this is to good to last and restarted Mail, still fixed. So I went back in to see if that log file was there and it was. When I came back to mail it was back to it's old self again until I took the cloud off line, then put it back on line and all was good again. It is all about mail and cloud, anyway thanks for the very useful tip and I hope mail is fixed for sure. Battery life with the macbook pro and 10.11.2 looks to be at least 8 hours maybe more, but I have not timed it.

SOLVED

cumhuryalcin's solution has SOLVED this for me, Ive been running mail for 30min and so far looks good CPU from 250% now just 0.x%

My mail CPU problems started when migrating to ElCapitan. this folder

~/Library/Containers/comapplemail/Data/Library/Logs/Mail.

jumped from 50MB to 6GB!! I deleted it, and looks good now.

Previously to the above, I also tried the below link solutions with NO results

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2476217/mac-os-x/how-to-fix-apple-mail-by-r ebuilding-and-reindexing-the-mailbox.html#comments

UN-SOVED - NOT SOLVED

Disregard above, the Mail CPU problem still exists.

MY EXPERIENCES WITH THE EMAIL CPU PROBLEM AND HOW I FIXED IT

Called Apple, called my email provider - finally solved by another email client - read on if you're interested about my full blown experience

@VAZ and all others still having Mail problems under El Capitan.

My situation & the problems I had

- I upgraded to El Capitan only last December, and started struggling with Mail since then

- 5 IMAP accounts, few of them with probably thousands of mailboxes (I call it folders to structure email)

- one of the accounts is a HOVER email account with 87K mails, 7Gb size

- stopped syncing after about 40K messages; deleting 2 emails took minutes...; CPU at +150-200% all the time

- had exactly the same problem on my iMac and my MacBook

- NO Avast or any other third party stuff installed

- after 2 WEEKS (of syncing), I decided to call Apple

What I did before reaching my (final) solution

- called Apple. They gave me free support within 30 days after installing El Capitan. They were very willing to help. I turned out that my Exchange accounts (although I've configured them as IMAP) are OK. The problem was the HOVER account.

- called Hover. Didn't notice any problem on their side. What was very odd was that they told that because I was at 79% of quota usage (quota of 10Gb) likely caused the problem. Sounded a bit odd to me, but I started cleaning (mainly deleting attachments), and came down to 59% of quota. Problem still there. Deleting 2 messages did take minutes (Apple Mail says ‘Moving 1 of 2 messages’). Although the Hover support people were very friendly, they were not capable identifying the problem. (maybe because of the length of this post … it seems to be a tough one). So asked for a Hover test email account, to try exporting and importing…)

- I finally decided not to do this. I already has lost many days and nights with this bloody Apple Mail problem. I decided to try another email client … why not. After internet research, I decided to try out Mailmate (I’ve no vested interest in Mailmate!!). Airmail and Postbox were contenders, but read too many negative comments on stability and functionality.

My experience with Mailmate, and did it solve my problem?

• Started extremely fast
• Stopped syncing at 45000 messages. Sent a mail to their support guy –he even responded over the weekend- and got it fixed
• So YES it solved my problems. Should have done this sooner!

What I like and don’t like about Mailmate

LIKE

• Solved my problem
• Speed
• Intelligent – moving messages to folders is SMART!! If you send mail with an attachment and forget the attachment, he notifies you (he knows that you’re referring to an attachment…)
• Extremely helpful in getting your open mails to ZERO. The ‘correspondence’ feature is unique!

DON’T LIKE

• Doesn’t show me the photos of my contacts if they send mail. That was a way for me to visually get better view on messages.
• Editing – no wysiwyg – although you can format, it’s not as obvious as Apple mail
• NOT FREE – it costs 50 USD, but that outweighs the time I lost with my Apple mail problem!!
• Are ‘they’ here to stay? Is a disadvantage, but at the end of the day, it’s an email client. My mail is still safely in the cloud with my email provider(s).

So to anybody who experiences email issues under El Capitan, just give it a 30-day free trial!

(again, I’ve no vested interest pushing Mailmate but I’m just satisfied it solved my issue … and it’s amazing that Mailmate only uses 10-20% max of your CPU …

Hi Vaz: Is this an IMAP account? Do you have many folders and/or messages in it? I had the same problem, and the only way to bring the CPU down was to drastically reduce the number of folders (and consequently the number of messages). Other mail clients seem to be able to deal with the large number of folders/messages, but Mail in El Capitan cannot.

Actually I didn't have a lot of files or folder, like 100 messages in inbox and maybe 500 messages for the whole mail app, I even culled my mail boxes to half that and the problem came back.

I just bought this iMac top spect 2 days ago, they installed Avast security without me wanting it, there were many reports here to say that its Avast virus scanner is the problem

EWI,

This is not a fix, it is also not a solution. We call this a work-around.

Apple needs to fix it.

Gerard

Gerard,

I agree it is not a fix to the technical problem, but it's a solution to my email problem. However you call it, I just regret I didn't try it sooner as I lost so much time... and just wanted to share that with others

Edwin

Removed AVAST anti virus and it seems to have done the trick for me! Mail is down to 3.9% CPU and moving emails around now behaves normally.

Check your anti virus!

Uninstalling AVAST anti virus did not fix it for me, mail CPU still at 150 to 250%.

Im on a new Fresh OSX install on late 2015 iMac.

my Mail only has about 200 messages.

Restarting mail fixes things but high CPU% usage comes back after minutes or a couple of hours.

El Capitan 10.11.3 was just released. Anyone tried it already? Anyone knows whether there is a solution to this problem?

I have just installed it. On reboot I started Mail and so far it seems very fast in comparison.... only time will tell though...

Well, at least I know I'm not alone.