OS X Mail practically unusable since upgrading to Mountain Lion.

August 20, 2012 3:54 PM

OS X Mail practically unusable since upgrading to Mountain Lion. 2.66 GHz Intel Core i5 with 16 GB of ram...

The thing is like typing in mollasses. Any suggestions?

I've already run the disk utilities programs, which fix the problem for about 5 minutes and then it returns.

posted by You Should See the Other Guy to computers & internet (16 answers total)

It's possible Spotlight is reindexing everything, or that Mail is doing something organizational with your inboxes. How large are your Mail accounts? See what programs and processes are using your CPU cycles most in Activity Monitor, under Applications/Utilities.

How long has it been since you upgraded?
posted by supercres at 3:59 PM on August 20, 2012

Oh, right. Yes, whatever the latest is: OS X 10.8 (12A269).
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 3:59 PM on August 20, 2012

I upgraded the day it came out. Spotlight doesn't seem to be doing anything. None of my Top Bar thingies are "in progress".

Activity Monitor lists mail at 100 or more %. Everything else at 5 or less percent.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 4:02 PM on August 20, 2012

Are you using any Mail add-ons or plugins like Mail Act-On or Attachment Tamer that might not have been updated to work with 10.8? If so, can you disable or uninstall them?
posted by bcwinters at 4:09 PM on August 20, 2012

No, not that I'm aware of.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 4:10 PM on August 20, 2012

Have you killed the preferences since you upgraded?
posted by leahwrenn at 4:17 PM on August 20, 2012

I don't know what that means.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 4:21 PM on August 20, 2012

There's some info & suggestions in this thread on the Apple Support forums.
posted by Pinback at 4:24 PM on August 20, 2012

Instructions in that thread say to remove this folder: /Users//Library/Application Support/AddressBook

It doesn't exist on my machine. Or I can't see it.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 4:32 PM on August 20, 2012

Here's instructions for finding and deleting the preferences; this would definitely be where I would start. (I'm not running Mountain Lion yet, and I'd forgotten they'd hidden the Library files).
posted by leahwrenn at 4:37 PM on August 20, 2012

As far as finding the User/Library location, it's not visible by default. Make sure the Finder is your frontmost window and select 'Go' on the Menu Bar. The dropdown list will have a lot of folders, but the 'Library' folder will be conspicously absent. The trick is to hold down the 'Option' key while you have the dropdown list selected. The 'Library' folder will appear and you can select it and any further folder you'll need access to.
posted by qwip at 4:51 PM on August 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

Make your Library visible by default: open up Terminal, type

sudo chflags nohidden ~/Library

Enter your password when prompted, assuming you have admin privileges.

My guess, as someone says above, is that your mail.app is busy indexing or reformatting something, and that if you leave it alone for several hours it'll stop and work fine. What that something might be will rather depend upon how your email is configured, and if you're not storing everything locally (say in particular by using Microsoft Exhange services through work) then it could be quite hard to diagnose without local expertise.
posted by cromagnon at 5:01 PM on August 20, 2012

Try deleting the envelope index.
1) Quit Mail.app.
2) In Finder, from the menu bar choose "Go" and under that "Go to Folder..." (short cut is +Shift+G)
3) Navigate to the Mail folder. You'll want to type in "~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData"
4) Delete everything that starts with "Envelope". (I have "Envelope Index", "Envelope Index-shm", and "Envelope Index-wal")
5) Restart Mail. Mail will act like it's re-importing all your existing messages. If you had a lot of mail or multiple accounts, this may take some time.
5a) Don't worry if it's not immediate. Use Activity Monitor to check that the program is still responding.
posted by now i'm piste at 6:24 PM on August 20, 2012

Okay, I deleted the stuff in the Library and I followed now i'm piste's instructions.

Activity Monitor shows Mail at approx 80%.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 8:42 PM on August 20, 2012

How much mail do you have, and how are you connecting to the mail server (e.g. IMAP, POP, Exchange)? Also, how long have you let it sit and do its thing?

The amount of mail is the more important thing. Do you have a junk mail folder with thousands of items? (You may have to click the "Show" button in the bottom left of the toolbar to see what folders you have.)

I'm not sure how it's configured by default, but on my machine Mail downloads every message I have, and their attachments. If I were to delete all my accounts and then re-add them, it would take quite a while for Mail to download and process it all.

That said, Mail running at 80% of CPU or more seems a little odd. And, if you've let it run for more than overnight it seems like it probably should have finished whatever it's doing.

One other thing you can check: go to the Window menu, then Activity and see if it shows something there.
posted by danielparks at 11:36 PM on August 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

One other thing you can check: go to the Window menu, then Activity and see if it shows something there.


This seemed to be the problem. It was looping through a check of one of my mail servers. I took that account offline and the CPU dropped to 2.5%.

Thanks, everyone!
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 5:45 AM on August 21, 2012