Mail constantly downloading messages

I ended up deleting the account and setting it up again. This seems to have fixed the problem.

my mail is constantly downloading - that said, I haven’t had an actual email come through for over a month. When I go to deleted the reloaded mail, it asks me…delete 1,276 messages for the single one. Frustrating to say the least. My is’t a mail exchange account.

as I look at it at the moment, its currently downloading 167 of 24,430 seriously!

Stuart,

Thanks, the envelope deleting did the tick - it's stopped the continual downloads.

I too have this exact problem at the moment and have had it numerous times it in the past. I have rung Apple Care about it many times and they always act as if they've never heard of the issue before and they try to push the blame back on me in someway, like it's something I've done to stuff up Mail. There is no "Care" from Apple. Look how long this problem has existed and they haven't been able to fix it!! Or maybe haven't tried? Despite all the updates we are advised to download. It's unbelievable. And extremely frustrating. If anyone has come across a solution for this problem as of 13 Sept 2016, I would be really grateful to hear how you've done it. Cheers.

I have only noticed this in the last 24hrs. In that time my home internet has been down and I have had to resort to hot spotting from my iPhone 5s. I wonder if it has to do with more syncing messages between the iPhone and the MacBook as this would seem like a logical answer give the higher numbers?

It would be good to know what people think as I am concerned I am chewing up my phone data.

I saw this for limiting the amount of mail in your imap folders via Google mail settings. Haven't tried it yet but it seems helpful. http://www.rawinfopages.com/mac/content/stop-gmail-downloading-thousands-emails- mac-mail

This worked for me - thanks.

Hi, Happy to report I solved this problem in my case. I had this problem since performing a clean macOS Sierra 10.12 install. Today I went through the Mailbox Behaviors for each account and set Erase junk messages & Erase deleted messages to After one month, for each of my email accounts. The downloading status now goes away after downloading new emails from each account.

I also found these instructions for rebuilding the Apple Mail database, it has helped solve problems in the past http://c-command.com/spamsieve/help/how-can-i-rebuild-apple

Hi Recto Bold,

I have had this problem for a few weeks now. After disabling Avast Security (Free) my mail works normally again. The strange thing with my problem was that I have both "Live" and "hotmail" accounts (both provided by microsoft) but only the hotmail account had the problem.

Thanks for your advice.

This worked for me! many thanks

I have my Exchange mail also coming in through my Mac Mail and changing the Erase settings does not appear to help. I was wondering if you have any other suggestions. I also wonder if this constant downloading will chew up data.

Finally decided that using the beta of Sierra was foolish.I uninstalled and went back to Yosemite. Thanks!

kschweickhardt, you're a freakin' genius! I'm running factory installed Sierra on a brand new MacBook Pro (2016). I am running my iCloud email account and set up my AOL account (I know I know) on the Mac Email client with about 40,000 messages on the AOL server in numerous folders. I have had the "downloading messages" and "moving messages" indicator on the bottom of the sidebar with various numbers ranging from 3 to 30,000 messages for about 4 days. Sometimes the computer would hit the maximum number of emails after 5 hours and I would think it was done, only to start again with a different amount. Your simple fix worked, instantaneously! Amazing! Thanks for sharing!

Yes, I do have the same issue. Even after updating to Beta 2, this issue still remains unsolved.

I'm getting pretty disappointed with the quality of Apple's products: both software and hardware.

It's happening to my GoDaddy imap account too!