Mail is always "Downloading Messages".

I'm sticking my fingers down my throat at this response to a perfectly legitimate question by ggerritis, with whom I have complete sympathy. For a number of years now I have had similar issues when first opening Mac Mail on a number of different Mac computer's but this never happens on Windows email clients upon which I don't have any particular love for - so this is not a Windows promotion by any means. There has definitely been something wrong with Mac Mail over several versions on different releases of Mac OS X (mac OS) from at least Maverics through to El Capitan and maybe Sierra as well whereby despite every attention to detail regarding setting up accounts there are still a few (not always the same on each different computer) accounts that absolutely refuse to abide by the user deliberately deselecting "include when automatically checking for new messages" which is a very obvious plain English statement that the user should expect to function exactly as it says period, or as we have said in the UK for centuries "full stop". There is obviously a random bug in Mail software, so please do not insult users intelligence by using nice sounding corporate spin excuses and fobbing people off into a false wild goose chase. What is the point of including a perfectly obvious option if it systematically refuses to carry out the function as described. Let's have the truth for once and an honest answer that there is absolutely an issue and that it has been recognised and that is being seriously looked into.

I had the same problem for months and it was driving me insane. Luckily, something extremely simple helped solve the problem.

1. Open your email

2. Turn off wifi

3. Close/quit email (force quit if you have to)

4. Reopen email

5. While email is open, turn on wifi

Boom. I no longer had the "Downloading xxx messages" message. 🙂

According to this article : Mail for Mac: View Mail activity

• See status and activities: Mail shows some status information at the end of the Favorites bar—for example, if an account is offline.Mail shows some activities at the bottom of the Mail sidebar. For example, it shows messages being downloaded or when it’s paused a large download to save energy while your Mac is on battery power (you can click the button to resume the download).
• Monitor activities: Choose Window > Activity to open the Activity window.

In my system about eight thousand mails were downloading , so what I did , opened the mail And was connected to wifi and didn't closed the lid of the Lap top , just monitored the activity once they were completed then closed , but this happens when new mails arrives and , they are showing their activities .

It's a normal behaviour .

Hellooooooo Apple. Time to get on this and give us an option to select how far back the download of emails go or just a selection to stop old emails from downloading at that time.

Don't continue to be so arrogant and sure that we will continue to purchase products from you in the future.

When it really counts and you need us we may not be there for you either!

KURT

Hiya,

I found a fix for that behaviour. I don't know if it will help all of you.

In the folder ˜User/Library/Mail/V5/MailData/

you will find three files starting "ExternalUpdates.*", shut down Mail, delete these and restart.

This downloading activity is always shown and I have seen it always , is this activity creating some mails issues I don't think so , is Mac user unable to send or receive mails , then that point is to be considered .

As IMAP account is configured with gmail server so quite very normal .

The correct mail preferences should be like this .

Some set as manual , or choose other options .Generally it is kept always automatic , and user must check the settings in web mail account has the settings changed there also , I have to check out some settings that could cause .

Apple doesn’t routinely monitor the discussions. These are mostly user to user discussions.

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem or a suggestion for change. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem/suggested change solved sooner.

Mail Feedback

I am clear on that. But if you don't think they peruse these forums once in a while I think you'd be wrong. Anyway I have been on Apple products for more years than I can count and I have seen many an issue such as this.

Tygb - it's NOT normal behavior. Yes, it's normal for Mail to show this message when it is downloading new messages. But when all messages have already been downloaded, and it still shows something like "Downloading 302 of 400 messages" something is wrong. Particularly when it almost constantly shows that message. There are several people on this thread (and a quick Google search turns up a lot more) that are experiencing this. It's not uncommon and certainly not "normal."

You're missing the point. It hangs in the middle of downloading and will stay like that indefinitely until either quitting, or disabling the account. Sometimes it ends, sometimes it doesn't. It's not normal behavior.

Neddog wrote:

You're missing the point. It hangs in the middle of downloading and will stay like that indefinitely until either quitting, or disabling the account. Sometimes it ends, sometimes it doesn't. It's not normal behavior.

You're right, this is not normal behavior.

I also see this "Downloading " message often, but for me at least it is only a cosmetic glitch. It is not actually downloading anything.

Just pressing command-shift-N (check mail) clears it up.

Tygb - Please stop. You're not helping the discussion. The response you just posted is about checking gmail in a browser. Completely irrelevant. I appreciate that you're trying to help, but if you don't think it's a problem, you needn't continue to respond.

Same issue here. It all started with El Capitan - approximately 3,000 emails download everyday which really maxes out my data limit when hot spotting from my cellphone. A greyed out "automatically detect and maintain account settings" is the same here. Apple, let's fix this obvious bug.

Same issue here... everyday (actually every time I launch Mail) I watch my CPU activity peg at >90% Mail as it downloads the same 12k messages. I tried to see which account was the issue but using "Window > Activity" only shows the summary (Downloading 12,345) not the specific account (which makes that pretty much useless for customer side debugging). I'd like a solution, maybe in 2017?

I have the same problem on my iPad and iPhone running 11.2.1

Sometimes the Mail app seems to get confused and on launching will say checking for mail, then delete all my messages in my inbox and redownload. This can happen for months but then it stops and behaves normally, by just downloading new messages and tidying up messages that have been deleted on anotheir device.

I think the problem occurs when new messages are being downloaded on slow network connection and I have tried to delete messages before the download has finished. I think there must be some flag against a message or maybe there is an index which is corrupt and therefore forces a full download.