Q: Mail after El Capitan update gets stuck at downloading messages
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Oct 12, 2015 2:10 PMby Linc Davis,Please sign out of iCloud in its preference pane and sign back in. No data will be removed from the servers, and you can retrieve it by signing back in. That said, you should always have a current archive of the data for safety's sake, even if you don't sign out.
If you use iCloud Keychain, when you sign back in to iCloud follow one of the procedures described in this support article to set it up on an additional device.
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Oct 16, 2015 11:40 AMby Marianinho100,Thats not the answer.. same issue by me. I have 30GB logs...
My logs:
Oct 16 00:47:35 Mail[6666] <Debug>: [my@me.com - Inbox] <Body Fetch> Recalculated priorities - network: 23, persistence: 0
Oct 16 00:47:35 Mail[6666] <Debug>: [my@me.com - Inbox] <Body Fetch> Network operation: <IMAPSyncBodiesOperation:0x7faf785f3f20> 1 messages, 0 bodies left to fetch
Truly thinking about to downgrade to Yosemite, thats not good, Apple...
here same issues: https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp_betas/comments/3b3alh/os_x_1011_beta_2_mail_g enerating_20gb_log_files/
***?
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Oct 16, 2015 4:32 PMby Alexander Grove,I have the same problem with my iCloud account - all other accounts seem ok. Tried deactivating account, quitting, restarting, reactivating, unchecking auto detect, rebuilding mailbox etc. Eventually used Onyx to clear caches after log took 30GB and Mac crashed for the first time in years through low memory. Onyx recovered space. Mail relaunched. Now stuck on the last 500 messages of 10,000 downloading again. Very annoying. As usual, "modern" Apple is releasing buggy updates. I can add this to my irritating new iOS bugs.
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Jan 5, 2016 6:59 PMby stevenfromhighgate,Aaaarrrggghhhh tell me about it! I've had terrible problems with mail constantly using up RAM and processor - often over 100% CPU for mail, even after all my mail accounts have eventually synced (which has taken weeks). It's driving me nuts.
One or more of my mail accounts - I don't think iCloud is the worst culprit for me - particularly an exchange account I use for a work client, is continually writing log files to the following folder
/Users/xxxxxxxxx/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Logs/Mail
The largest file is called 'BodyFetch.log' which reached over 10Gb before I needed to delete it to create space. The SSD drive isn't large enough to let these files continue to grow. There is clearly an issue with one or more mail accounts - I don't have enough space on the drive to have duplicate accounts in outlook. Is there any way the log files can be turned off?
I'd hoped the first El Capitan update would resolve the issue, whereas in fact the second update caused complete meltdown! My Macbook Pro is only just over a year old, not exactly passed it's sell-by date. I needed to download the OS to an external drive just to get it to reboot. Re-installing the OS didn't work so I then had to completely wipe the drive in order to just get back to where I was before installing OS 10.11.2.
Apple support actually contacted me - after I posted a similar request for help - i& instructed me to download a diagnostic file & to send the results. I had difficulty uploading the diagnostics using the link provided by Apple, since the file was large. I received several calls & emails which was impressive....until I managed to send the data, then radio silence. I have sent multiple emails asking for any feedback and advice......and received no response whatsoever.
All advise gratefully welcomed!
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Jan 8, 2016 8:27 PMby makalu57,I figured this out after a call to Apple Support. It took them a while to fix as well. I think the problems originate from a synchronisation issue between the Mac Mail database and the Apple servers. The activity window indicated that the synchronisation was stuck in some way. Anyway this is what I did eventually to resolve the problem:
1. Ensure you have a backup (Time Machine or others). This goes without saying...
2. Open Mail (or Systems Preferences) and click on Accounts. The Systems Preferences box will open.
3. Highlight your iCloud account. Click on the "-" button to delete it. You will be given several choices to keep your other information (keychains, photos, etc., and nothing is deleted from the cloud - your information is safe, and can still be accessed on an iPad/iPhone, etc.)
4. Once you do this you will notice (after a few minutes, depending on the size of your Mail database) that all your iCloud emails will have disappeared from the Mac Mail client. If you don't see that, then just quit and reopen Mac Mail and they will have gone.
5. In the Systems Preferences pane again click "+" and add your iCloud details again (email and password). Depending on the size of your email database the Mac Mail app will take several minutes to several hours to repopulate. I have over 25,000 messages and it took a few hours.
6. Once the repopulation process completes this resolves most of your problems (leading me to think that somehow the Mac based database was in some way corrupted to an extent that a rebuild did not fix it - I tried that before doing the above).
7. There are a few issue that you will have to solve additionally if you have more than one email account. The first is that your iCloud account will not be first in the list, so when you click on "new message" the Mail app will default to some other account you have in the list. This is annoying. To fix this you go in to Mail/Preferences/Composing and select the iCloud account you want from the dropdown list in the "Send new messages from:" choice.
8. The second issue you have to fix only if you have associated your account with a signature authority. I have a Verisign encryption key associated with my @mac.com account, so if you have that as well, you need to select the address ending associated with Verisign in the choice above.
9. Finally the re-installment process will delete the mail signature files associated with your iCloud account so you will need to re-edit them (but this is a small issue).
I hope this helps...
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Jan 15, 2016 7:20 PMby makalu57,I wrote my reply too soon. The solution I outline above did indeed fix the problem, for a few days at least. Sadly the problem returned. So I called Apple again and this time I spoke to an Apple Mail specialists. While the solution above may fix some of the problems, as it solves potential corruption of databases, what it does not appear to fix is corruption of cache files. This seems may be the root of the problem. So the solution is actually quite simple: delete a stack of cache files. Deleting any of the list below (and you need to delete all of them, files AND folders) won't affect your system in any way.
From /Libary (you can find the master Library folder in the first list you get when you open your hard drive) delete:
/Library/Caches
/Library/InputMethods
/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchDaemons
/Library/StartupItems
/Library/ScriptingAdditions
Then, while clicking the Option button at the Finder level, click on Go and Libraries. This will access your user Libraries. Delete these:
~/Library/Caches
~/Library/InputMethods
~/Library/LaunchAgents
~/Library/ScriptingAdditions
~/Library/savedapplicationstate
Restart the Mac. Everything should work now. Again I think this problem stems from a synchronisation issue that El Capitan has introduced between the Apple server databases and your Mac. Apple has admitted that there are issues introduced in the Mail functionality by ElCap, but I don't know the specifics. Anyway, clearing the cache files should fix this problem. Let me know if this worked for you. I am interested if the problem reoccurs. If it does on my Mac I will write about it here again.
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Mar 9, 2016 9:31 AMby ZugSp1tz3,DANGER!
After getting absolutely disgusted with Apple Mail making a mess out of my eMail I stumbled on this post. And I foolishly followed the instructions exactly as listed. (post from makalu57)
And what was the result? Absolute DISASTER. After rebooting my Mac (which was running OS X 10.11.3) m
BEWARE!any of my programs either did not work at all or worked in bizarre, new ways. Ways that I was not interested in having them work. I started by re-installing the affected programs. Which did work in a few cases but not most. In the end the only way to recover was to do a Clean Install of El Capitan. Which is a very laborious task if you have lots of files and software like I do.
I have no idea where this idea that these directories/files have no use came from. I do not know what the purpose of each directory or file is. But apparently at least some of them have critical purposes.
If you perform this procedure be prepared for a monstrous mess that probably cannot be cleaned up without a clean re-install. And what else did I find? Well, before re-installing OS X my mail was just as much of a mess as it was before. Meaning the procedure did NOTHING for the problems I had with mail.
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Mar 17, 2016 9:43 AMby Zebbler,Hm... I have a similar problem - after upgrading to El Capitan, my Mail app is stuck on "downloading messages" but not in a predictable way, it says downloading 14 out of 16, and has been stuck on downloading these last two emails for seemingly a few days by now...
Is there a way to interrupt the process? The old OS I used had a "stop" button in the "activity window", which El Capitan doesn't seem to have anymore. Reading the comments above didn't quite help my confidence. I guess I would at least like to know which messages these are that are "downloading", I am not even sure which account they are from... I love Mail app, as I've been using it for years and have a ton of routing and other preferences setup to make it really useful, but this behavior is odd and I'd love to fix it. -
Mar 17, 2016 10:26 AMby Zebbler,Well things turned out to be pretty easy for me so far. I simply restarted the Mail app and it seems to be working fine now? It completely forgot about these two messages it was trying to download forever. I am assuming those things were not of any concern and maybe even non-entities. (I hope)
The only thing I did before restarting was go through all of my accounts, and I removed one of the old accounts that was no longer active in preferences.
Anyway... Hope it stays working, that would be nice
