Mail constantly downloading messages

I can temporarily get rid of it by going into mail-preferences- server - and unchecking the automatically manage server connections box. Then exiting mail then reopening. I have them been rechecking the box and the number then restarts growing.

Helen Randfield

I just upgraded to High Sierra last Thursday on my iMac desktop and had been going mad with the constant checking for new email and downloading. What I finally noticed today after searching for solutions was that after the upgrade, an IMAP account was added - I don't know how or why. Once I inactivated the IMAP account and reactivated my existing POP account everything went back to normal.

I had the same problem, but my mail was downloading THOUSANDS of emails. Drove me crazy. Here is the quick, simple and easy fix I found. This worked for me:

http://www.rawinfopages.com/mac/content/stop-gmail-downloading-thousands-emails- mac-mail

My reply seems to be really late. But did you sign up for the Office 365 for Mac ? I am also facing the same problem with my apple mail.

1. The emails keep downloading, always

2. If I am moving messages from inbox to trash or any other folder it seems to take ages.

If you have moved to outlook for Mac. Let me know how is it working for you.

Thanks.

This is a method which I used after reading it on another blog and it worked very well. You end up with some emails downloaded again but after you threw them away the problem does no longer exist

abfackeln Jan 26, 2017 at 10:47 AM

I was able to fix this problem using a variation of the info suggested by @Dataless.

the file MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded3 does exist, apparently, in the user/Library/Mail/V3/MailData folder, along with two other similarly named files MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded3-shm and MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded3-wal

i deleted all three just to be sure.

i restarted mail and this time it had many more mails to download but they all seemed to count off without problems -- and i no longer have the downloading message.

Wonder if this might be it as the problem only started to happen when I changed from IMAP to POP. But when I check my list of accounts it just has my normal mail account ( the POP one ) and iCloud IMAP. I went to try and delete the iCloud one as I don't use as mail but it was funnelling me into deleting the whole of my connection with iCloud which I do use for other things....

Yairz,

I have the same problem, exactly as you describe. Sorry I don't have a solution, but you are not alone. My Mail application frequently indicates it is "Downloading Messages" on the bottom left. Currently it is at 7,476 of 12,454 and rising. The numbers change continuously. Often times it stops and starts over again. It has to be some kind of sync issue but I can't figure out what. I also do not know what email account or folder it is downloading to.

I am having the same/similar issue. I am able to temporarily correct if I unclick Mail within my iCloud account (preferences), close mail, then reopen mail, and finally reenable iCloud mail. Then the @mac.com account resyncs briefly before showing and holding on downloading. Quite frustrating. The best I can do for the moment is either use this account on my iPhone or via the iCloud browser and hope that eventually when a patch comes out the mail will sync properly.

Hi:

Check this thread.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7275988?start=0&tstart=0

Some people have found that disabling Avast helps. In my case that did not work. But I managed to keep Mail's CPU under control by reducing the number of folders in my IMAP account. In my case Mail still uses ~200% CPU, but since I have less folders it does it only for ~10-20s when it checks for new emails (before it was ~4-5 minutes), and hence it is not killing the whole Mac. I think that there is still a problem in Mail in El Capitan which I hope gets resolved in the next update. I don't know whether this is your problem, but perhaps this thread helps. Cheers, Mariano.

I am having the problem with mail re-downloading. This only happens with one of about 10 mail accounts I have. It is a GoDaddy imap account. I have several other GoDaddy accounts where this does not happen.

I do not have Avast or any other A/V software installed.

What I have done:

I have deleted and recreated the account three times.

I have backed up my drive, the erased it, did a fresh install of El Capitan and used migration assistant to copy back my data, apps and settings.

I have deleted the V2 Folder.

I notice that the problem seems to coincide with the following message in my console log:

Mail[2927]: [IMAP] Server sent warning response for command CAPABILITY: * NO Error in IMAP command received by server.

John: I'm curious whether that problematic account has many folders and/or many emails. Thanks. Mariano

It just has the default IMAP folders. The Inbox has 17,000 messages and Sent has 7,000. Total of about 3.5 Gigs.

I have 5 email accounts. Two of them are very large with a large number of folders and several GB of emails. One account uses a MS Exchange server at my office. The other is an IMAP account through GoDaddy. Although I can't tell which account is being re-downloaded over an over, I believe that having a large number of folders and emails is part of the problem. It is interesting that both John Strung and I are using GoDaddy. Perhaps that is part of the problem. However, my iPhone is set up with the same accounts but it does not have re-downloading the issue like my Mac does.

One thing I did that helped was to clean up my email folders in both the IMAP and the Exchange accounts. I emptied the Trash, deleted everything in the Drafts folder and Junk folders, deleted old folders, and so on. My thought was to reduce the amount of folders/messages that need to be sync'ed. The re-downloading issue happens quite a bit less now (once every 2 or 3 days).