See the update ->
https://buymymonkey.wordpress.com/2020/11/30/big-sur-has-it-solved-the-mac-mail-cpu-memory-issue/
Quick post about an ornery problem I encountered after upgrading my 2018 MacBook Pro from Mojave to Catalina. In short, when running Mac Mail, the CPU would spike so high that the fans would come on and this thing sounded like it was about to launch from an aircraft carrier. At one point my MacBook Pro circled the room and landed in the den. Part of that is not true; I don’t have a den. Spent hours trying to figure out the cause and I think I’ve nailed it – and want to pass this along to others.
Also had an issue with TimeMachine backups but I’ll save that for another post as I’m still confirming this is resolved.
Finally, it seems like nothing has changed since the 1981 MS PC days because for issues like this, the most common posts I found were to reinstall the O/S, reboot the drive, delete the entire keychain (are you listening to me, you horrible Windows Registry??) – I didn’t try any of those because clearly those are not the problem (except maybe for the Catalina upgrade not going well and having to be re-done).
CUSTOMARY WARNING: I am not responsible for anything bad that happens to your computer should you choose to follow my suggestions. This fixed my problem but may not fix yours and may corrupt or damage or whatever your system. You are warned, and I am protected. A win-win!
Symptoms:
- High CPU to the point where your fans are driving like the wind
- Open Activity Monitor and you see a process called accountsd sucking in 400% CPU and often the Mail process close behind. Am I going to have to separate you two!?
- Killing the accountsd process solves the problem until it starts back up and Mail tries to resync.
- Open Console and you see errors like this:
-
CSSMERR_DL_DATASTORE_DOESNOT_EXIST over and over and over, generated by our pal the accountsd process.
-
dbBlobVersion() failed for a non-existent database error message
-
The problem apparently stems from a “ghost keychain” issue. I saw that in one post and then tried to figure out what the heck a “ghost keychain” was. In fact, it’s an empty keychain. Keychains often refer to files or other locations, and a “ghost keychain” basically refers to nothing. Apparently, accountsd doesn’t know how to handle that and so it goes berserk trying to open…well…nothing. Much like Christmas day for me.
Solution:
Open the Keychain.app by pressing CMD+spacebar and typing in Keychain and pressing enter. Once up, look for something that looks like this:
The item in question is imported_login. Now, the general indicator of the existence of a “ghost_keychain” is that to the left it will have an empty box (as shown above). I made a BIG assumption that only “ghost_keychains” show up like this, so be warned – you may find this to mean something else that I have not discovered yet.
A second indicator of a “ghost_keychain” is that when you click on the Keychain item, as I have done above, the right side where it displays the details in the selected keychain is blank. Hence “ghost”. So I think those two together make it safe safe to delete that keychain entry.
Select the “ghost_keychain”, and press the Delete key. When prompted, select the “only delete reference and not the actual files” message. I don’t recall the exact message (I didn’t screen cap it!) but it’s basically asking “do you want to leave the files that this keychain entry refers to and simply delete the reference?” In this case, there are no files that it refers to, but still just to be careful I told it only to delete the reference.
Once that’s done, you have to kill the accountsd and Mail processes once more. The accountsd process will restart and maybe cause your fans to spin up just for a little bit (don’t panic!) but then everything settles down and appears to be resolved.
It has been about 20 mins and the fan issue has not popped up again. Please let me know if this solves your problem. It’s likely that Apple will release a patch to Catalina that resolves this issue.
My other problem is related to how oddly Time Machine is behaving. The initial backup after the Catalina upgrade didn’t take, and it tried over and over to back up 2.5GB only to fail at the end. So I watched it complete and noticed that once it reaches 100%, it keeps copying files to the backup mount point. It eventually completes, but if you lose power or the Wifi blips during this time it seems to want to start over. More on this once I figure out what the heck is going on there.
10/31/19 Update –
Whelp, this helped a little but accountsd is stilling running amuck. If your’s is as well, here’s another thing you can try to help ease the impact of this problem.
- Head to Mail
- Select “Preferences”
- Then select “General”
- Then change “Check for New Messages” to “Every Minute”
If nothing else, this causes Mail to throttle back how hard it hits your computer. Accountsd still pops up but then dissipates.
So the items above are not a FIX, but seem to relieve some of the symptoms. Will keep updating this post as I try different things.
11/4/19 Update –
Alright – this appears to have provided some relief. Let me know if it helps you. Here’s what I did:
- I went into Mac Settings, under Accounts, and disabled each of the mail accounts by unchecking Mail, Contacts, Reminders, and Calendar. I did that for all of the accounts.
- Then I opened Terminal and typed: sudo purge
- ..and pressed enter. This prompted me for my root password. (if you don’t know what that is or how to set that up, do a quick Google search on “Mac setting root password”.
- Then I restarted my Mac in Safe Mode by restarting the Mac will holding the SHIFT key down until I was presented with the login window.
- In Safe Mode, I ran Mail.
- I then exited Mail, and restarted the Mac normally.
- Since all of this hullaballoo, my accountsd process in Activity Monitor has been quiet and a lot of the error messages I was seeing in Console have disappeared.
- On the downside, my next Time Machine backup seemed to back up like 200+GB. Not sure if that’s related but Time Machine has been acting squirrelly since I upgraded to Catalina.
11/6/19 Update – With thanks to Helder Crespo!
If the above doesn’t solve the problem, try these additional steps that Helder Crespo did and commented on – and solved his problem:
- After booting your Mac into Safe Mode, launch your Keychain Access app and delete all keychain password entries for your email accounts.
- While staying in Safe Mode, re-add all of your mail accounts and make sure they’re activated.
- Restart your computer in normal mode.
- Launch Mail and see if this resolves your high CPU issues.
12/14/19 Update – Immediate (if not temporary) Relief
Well the problem persists despite my suggestions above, if less frequently. However, I’ve found a way to immediately (but temporarily) resolve the problem.
First, launch Activity Monitor (“Activity Monitor.app”)
How to launch Activity Monitor => Either hit CMD+Space and entering “Activity Monitor” in the entry field and then pressing Enter. Or can use Finder to go to the Utilities folder (under the Applications folder) and launch Activity Monitor it there.
The main window looks like this:
(your app will have the User filled in)
Next, click on the “Memory” tab.
Once there, click on the “Memory” column (perhaps twice) until it sorts largest to smallest, in terms of memory usage.
If your fans are spinning out of control and you’re using Catalina, you’ll likely see the process accountsd at or near the top. (Note: if the memory utilization for accountsd is less than 500MB or if the process is much lower in the list, then you can stop now because it’s likely not the cause of the issue).
Next, select the accountds process, then “x” button on the left top side of the window.
You’ll be presented with a Confirmation dialog that asks “Are you sure you really want to quite this process?”
At this point, you should select “Force Quit”. I’ve tried the softer “Quit” but it appears not to work for accountsd, so you have to instead body slam it to the ground.
Once you do that, accountsd will disappear, but then quietly re-appear lower in the list. Your CPU utilization will drop nearly immediately and your fan spinning will gradually diminish.
Note that I’ve also sporadically seen the Mail.app process at the top of the memory usage list. If so, you should just exit the Mail app gracefully and restart it. MS Outlook is constantly at the top because it’s a memory hog.
This appears to indicate either a) a memory leak in accountsd – or – working with Google accounts the process just keep growing larger and larger. There is a Terminal/Unix option to limit the memory use by a process, but I’m not sure how that would impact accountsd I haven’t tried it.
12/30 End of Year Update –
Heck, this is the End of Decade update! And this one thanks to read Maxim Ellenberg – he tried the following steps and was able to get permanent relief. Here are his very detailed instructions –
1. Make a backup of Apple Mail messages if you store anything locally (like storing something On My Mac, downloading via POP3 etc).
2. Go to System Preferences > Internet Accounts.
3. Delete all Exchange accounts.
[Editor: WARNING – this next step will remove all of your local archives. Please make sure you copy the directories listed to another location or make sure you have a working version of Time Machine or some backup. If you store all of your archives online, as I do, they will all restore]
4. Delete ~/Library/Mail and ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail folders (this will reset Apple Mail and its preferences).
5. Restart the Mac and uncheck “Reopen windows when logging back in” to make sure Apple Mail won’t start after rebooting.
6. Go to Internet Accounts, click on +, select Exchange, enter your name and email address.
7. Click on Configure Manually and enter your password.
8. Uncheck everything (like Contacts, Notes, Calendar etc) and leave only Mail checked. You will be able to add it later (see below).
9. Start Apple Mail and go to Preferences > Accounts.
10. Select your Exchange account and click on Server Settings tab.
11. Uncheck “Automatically manage connection settings”.
12. Make sure both Internal and External URLs are set to https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx.
13. Close Preferences and restart Apple Mail.
14. If you need Contacts and Calendars, go to System Preferences > Internet Accounts, select your Exchange account and enable the services you need to sync.
Give it a shot and let me/us know whether you see permanent relief.
On the Apple Support Forums, people are trying all sorts of things with a variety of resuslts. In the end, the evidence of the problem appears to be that accountsd grows bigger and bigger in terms of memory use. It seems once it reaches 2GB, all sorts of CPU hogging starts to happen – likely due to memory paging going on.
Also an important note is that an update to OS X (10.15.3) is coming out shortly. It’s already in Beta with a number of users and there’s no definitive answers on whether this issue is resolved.
Check out my ongoing attempts to resolve this ->
A Day in a Monkey's Life 
This seems to have worked for me too. Thanks!!!
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It seemed to work for a while, but accountsd and mail are again in full throttle.
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Odd, not me yet. Hmmmm I’ll keep looking.
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I’d be curious to see a log of your console app
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The issue seems finally fixed, and has been behaving well for the past few hours, unlike anything else I had tried so far. What did it for me was (this within your solution of 11/4): also delete all keychain password entries (including old ones) for the email accounts; add/activate the accounts *while in safe mode* (maybe this is already part of your solution, but was not stated explicitl); restart. Thanks for your ingenuity in finding a solution for such a debilitating problem, and for your generosity posting it!
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Oh heck, you’re welcome. I’ll update my article to include the explicit things you did. Thank you, Helder!
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There’s one thing I can’t do though: interrupting the internet connection (in my case, switching off the wifi). Both mail and accountsd go berserk again, although time time the process appears reversible, in the sense that everything goes back to normal once the connection is reestablished. It’s a great improvement. I can’t thank enough for the silence. It’s impressive how disturbing runaway fans can be, in particular when you know that the machine is clearly doing some useless thing that takes away from whatever actual work you want to do.
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I think you’re right that there’s still something wrong. Just now my Mail hung up for no reason. I had to force kill it, and then just like yours, accountsd and Mail suddenly drove up my CPU utilization and the fans kicked into high gear. And just like you, it eventually settled down again.
I looked at the console.app output. Put in a filter of accountsd and there’s something going wrong. Access to certain elements is failing. Is access to “private” is failing but I couldn’t find anything like that in the KeyChain. And maybe “private” is just Mac scrubbing the logs of private info for security reasons.
I’ll keep you posted – and I updated the article and gave you credit! 🙂
Take care –
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What finally did it for me: after trying several things, including resetting the permissions on my home folder and reinstalling Catalina (and none of these solved the issue), I simply set the mail preferences – general – check for new messages to “Manually”; no other setting (e.g., every 5 minutes) seems to work, but setting to manually worked a charm. No more accountsd going wild, reagardless of the type of account. Furthermore, the mail app seems to be checking for new emails automatically anyway. So I’m happy with this simple solution, which may be helpful to you and to others.
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That sounds good but if you mark it manual it means you have to manually force a “Get Mail” or new mail won’t arrive automatically.
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Thanks Will. If I manage to find anything else I’ll let you know.
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That sounds good but if you mark it manual it means you have to manually force a “Get Mail” or new mail won’t arrive automatically.
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As I mentioned above, even though I’ve marked checking new emails as manual, mail still does the automatic checking. I don’t have to do anything manually. And I don’t get the previous error messages in the console. And more importantly, the problem seems to have disappeared. I imagine there must be some conflict when set to automatic or even every x minutes. Have you tried this yourself? It may be working on my system due to my particular settings and machine (2019 13 inch MacBook Pro with a quadcore i5, 8GB ram, 1TB SSD), but so far it’s the only thing that really seems to have solved the issue.
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P.S. I did try setting mail to manual checking only and it looks like it depends on what kind of account you have as to whether email will still show up automatically. Gmail accounts seem to still push email through, but iCloud accounts don’t and require you to either manually check or have automatic turned on.
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Oh looks like my original comment didn’t post, but basically before the P.S. I said thanks for all this info and I did try all the steps up through the 11/6 update and it did work for a few days. (I did this on Friday…) but then on Sunday the issue popped up again.
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I played it though. The hole shebang. Did not encountered any “imported_login”. But still bootet in safe mode, unmounted all accounts deleted passwords, reactivated accounts again etc. CPU still sky rocket high.
Instead I observe a strange thing: I have this long column with all read and unread emails. The line with the recipients is often flickering between “John Appleseed” and “John Appleseed, Apple Inc.” (company name). Or in another case is shows “Nicole Appleseed” and then very briefly “RA lic. jur. Nicole Appleseed” (that’s the content of the title field).
Summary: In my case it seems to be a problem connected with the way it shows the recipients according to their entries in my address book. The flickering occurs when emails are being downloaded from the server. I use the standard address book from Apple, synced through a Google account. Most of my currently 10 inboxes are either G Suite or free Gmail Accounts.
I still suspect something weird in the context of Apple Mail / Gmail. While I am getting increasingly sour over this issue, I enjoy the warm stream of my cpu fan here in cold Switzerland.
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Definitely Mail or Contacts related. When I turn off all of my Google Accounts, which doesn’t leave much, it settles down. There’s still something wrong and I’m still looking.
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Hi there
Thank you for your work. On my computer FileVaultMaster seems to be a ghost-keychain (square-icon, empty). In the general settings, everythings seems to be ok. Do you think I can proceed the same way as you did?
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I think so. I’ve had only intermittent issues since then. Once in a while I have to kill the accountsd process using Activity Monitor but otherwise it’s quieted down. There’s still something wrong however and I haven’t found it. It has something to do with synching Google Accounts but FaceTime appears to pop up as well. Very odd and not a stable upgrade from Apple.
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Hello, i have the same thing like ginetexspain with the names jumping back and forth, i found that they jump between the name the person is sending the mail from “Mister XXX <misterxxx@gmail.com" and the name you have in contacts where the mail address is attached (f.ex XXX Mister) it will jump between those, i have this on 2 of my Macs, but only one is spiking CPU with "accountsd".
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You, Sir, are amazing.
I’ve been fighting with this issue for about month now, and spent about 8 hours on the phone with useless AppleCare support. Today’s call was the worst – they (2nd level, for the third time) basically told me it’s Microsoft’s fault and they won’t help me b/c I can reinstall anytime and that it’s no hardware fault.
The Nov 6 solution did it for me!!
Aside from this, I also had the flickering name issue like it’s described by ginetexspain and Tom. It also seems to be gone now.
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Thanks George! 🙂 I don’t think I’ve 100% solved the problem because it does flair up every so often, but not as much. Every so often I have to bring up Activity Monitor and kill “accountsd” . It restarts automatically.
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Same here. It was peaceful for some days with firing up sometimes for a minute or so. Now it’s back, but not at the same extent as before. It’s awful, also because when working on the road the computer’s battery is depleted within less than one hour. It even loses battery when it’s plugged in my 60W USB-C PD monitor.
It’s one of the worst things I’ve experienced in 20+ years being a Mac user. The support on the matter is totally unacceptable…
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Since in my case it only has something to do with e-mail, I’ve decided to “solve” the case straight forward: use another e-mail client.
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I’ve found this to help – and for some reason the issue is starting to die down. When you see the CPU spike and the fans come on – run “Activity Monitor”. Filter the list to showing only “accountsd” (which will have a CPU running out of control) and then KILL it using the force kill button. It restarts itself and apparently this doesn’t cause any harm.
The other thing I’ve done is use Activity Monitor’s “Memory” tab and sort from largest to smallest. I’ll often find “accountsd” to have Gigs of memory allocated, which would cause it to swap to disk. KILL the process if that happens as well.
Both of those will give you instant relief and save your batteries.
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I have a similar problem, but it’s related to exchange accounts in mail. If I disable the exchange account in mail the problem vanish and accountsd behavior is normal. Not to mention that accountsd only goes berserk if there is no network connection, mail is open and an exchange account is enable. When mail try to fetch mail, enters in a loop that fire up acountsd
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Try something – next time it fires up like that, bring up Activity Monitor, select the “Memory” option and sort “largest to smallest” by clicking on that column. I’m finding memory usage up to 2Gb for accountsd. If so, “force kill” that process. It will restart. That gives immediately relief and seems to have no side effects.
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This seems to be exactly my problem too. The only thing that “fixed” it was changing the new message check from automatic to manual.
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“fixed” in quotes is right. 🙂 It’s a workaround…maybe we can en-masse report this bug to Apple…who wants to storm the castle with me?
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I recently created a clean new admin account and the behaviour is still exactly the same: any enabled Exchange will bring accountsd to full throttle whenever the network is off/down and the check for new email option is set to automatic.
Since this problem/bug seems to be occurring for different machines and configurations, I believe that reporting it to Apple seems like the right thing to do.
I’ll gladly join any effort on this sense. I never reported anything to Apple though. What should be the next step?
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To officially open an issue you contact Apple Support (via chat or via the phone) and report the problem. They open a case – but first have you try a number of things. Often that includes re-installing the OS or restoring from backup – both which are typically impractical. And then they’ll often resolve the issue in a patch update. I’ve opened a number of issues with Apple over the years and rarely has their support dept been able to officially fix the problem. I have a big problem now with Homekit where I can’t share my setup with anyone in my family. It’s been going on for two years now and is making me want to use Amazon or something else. They’ve not been able to resolve it, it seems to be a common problem (based on my Internet research) and I’ve done everything they’ve asked.
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The issue still exists in the latest macOS release (10.15.2). Shame on you, Apple!
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Ya no kidding, it’s pretty shameful. There’s something fundamentally wrong. Mine has settled down a little – once in a while I have to kill the accountsd process as its memory utilization exceeds 2GB. The swapping caused by that alone will spin those fans up. We’ll keep looking.
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I had to migrate from Exchange to IMAP just because of this issue (don’t want to install Outlook for Mac just because of this).
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I think I found a fix to this problem.
Please follow these steps:
1. Make a backup of Apple Mail messages if you store anything locally (like storing something On My Mac, downloading via POP3 etc).
2. Go to System Preferences > Internet Accounts.
3. Delete all Exchange accounts.
4. Delete ~/Library/Mail and ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail folders (this will reset Apple Mail and its preferences).
5. Restart the Mac and uncheck “Reopen windows when logging back in” to make sure Apple Mail won’t start after rebooting.
6. Go to Internet Accounts, click on +, select Exchange, enter your name and email address.
7. Click on Configure Manually and enter your password.
8. Uncheck everything (like Contacts, Notes, Calendar etc) and leave only Mail checked. You will be able to add it later (see below).
9. Start Apple Mail and go to Preferences > Accounts.
10. Select your Exchange account and click on Server Settings tab.
11. Uncheck “Automatically manage connection settings”.
12. Make sure both Internal and External URLs are set to https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx.
13. Close Preferences and restart Apple Mail.
14. If you need Contacts and Calendars, go to System Preferences > Internet Accounts, select your Exchange account and enable the services you need to sync.
Thats it. I was waiting for 2 days and it’s been working fine so far, no CPU spikes, accountsd and Mail processes are quiet.
Let me know if it helps or if you have any other questions regarding this.
Maxim
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Interesting! I’ll give it shot. Looks like the big change is setting up your own connection details for Exchange accounts? Let me know if it stays stable over the next few days. Mine will have issues about every week and when I check Activity Monitor for the accountsd process, it shows 2GB+ of memory usage. I kill it and it restarts and everything settles down. I wonder if the default connection settings are causing that process to leak memory or otherwise hold onto too much. Any process that holds that much memory (combined with other things going on on the Mac) would cause page swapping (memory) and ultimately some high CPU usage.
Great find! Good luck – and please let me know and I’ll update the article and give you due credit!
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This has been worked for me for 2 days without Mail or accountsd CPU spikes. I experimented turning the Internet connection on and off (both by turning on/off wifi and disabling the connection via Little Snitch). So far so good. Accountsd is 53.4 MB at the moment (compared to 1.5 GB before) and this hasn’t been changed during these couple of days.
Also, I tried to set my Exchange account up manually and it didn’t work for the first time. It ONLY works if you delete the folders I mentioned in my previous post and then set up Exchange account manually. I have no idea why.
Maxim
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So far so good, no more CPU spikes since Dec 26. You may update the article. 🙂
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Hey Maxim – are you still clear of issues?
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Yes, everything’s been working fine since December 26. No accountsd or Mail CPU spikes anymore!
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Hi,
I had the same problem. I’ve around 12 mail accounts configured from which 1 is a 365 account. Disabling this 365 (Take if offline) account solved the accountsd high CPU usage issue right away.
Another solution is setting Mail to check your email Manually instead of ‘Every x minutes’.
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That will do it, but then you can’t access the Office 365 mail, of course and for the other accounts it won’t check email unless you manually ask it to. So you’re right, this is likely a solution but then you’re having to turn off some key features. I’d prefer to find out why it’s not working! 🙂
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Me too, but for the moment this solved my issue with the high CPU usage and I hope your blog will give a final solution or Apple will solve it in a next update, as it is pretty (ahum, understatement) annoying yes.
Thanks for your blog, very helpful!
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Thank you!
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So after I did the 12/30 instructions, all worked well for about 6 hours. FML, a CPU spike. Accountsd and other processes going nuts. During the CPU Spike I logged into my Exchange control panel and tried one thing. I disabled Email Archiving. Once this was disabled I noticed an immediate drop in CPU back to normal levels. The console stopped spitting out 50 errors a second and for the past 3 hours my computer has been running quite smoothly. I am hopeful this was the cause of all my pain. When i think back, I enabled email archiving feature right around the time when I upgraded to catalina. Not sure why this would of caused issues or maybe I was suppose to do another step to let mac mail know archiving was enabled, however it looks as if this 5 month headache is now resolved. you can see my reddit post here: with everything i have tried to resolve this issue..
thank you for this guide.. it was helpful.
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I don’t have access nor manage Exchange. Or is there a Mac appliance or software called Exchange Panel?
Are you using Mac Mail at all? If you are, I have something I want you to look at. If not, disregard.
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Yes I am using Mac mail. In addition, since this last posting I have applied one more fix. when my CPU spikes I get a bunch of addressbook errors in the console. I rolled out this fix this AM and will inform you if it worked. The corrupted addressBook may be the cause of all this pain.
https://appuals.com/fix-mac-running-slow-due-addressbooksourcesync/
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I did a similar fix last night, both to the address book and to the Apple Spell folders. I cleaned both out and resynched. I have about 8 accounts in total, about 5 gmail and about 3 Exchange/Outlook365. I was still getting some memory growth of accountsd. I was looking at the Console App and there are a lot of permissions issues coming up. Weird messages about duplicate accounts. I’ll check tonight after leaving my laptop running all day to see if it’s running better. I really appreciate your running commentary, VIP! 🙂
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Ill make sure to post updates here as well as reddit. Looks like the last fix w/ the address book is working well.. however sometimes after a system reboot the issue comes back. Ill update this thread tomorrow after I reboot my system. So far so good tho.
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I just got home and checked – the accountsd process is > 1GB in size. Mail had hung up and when I restarted it, accountsd went berzerk for a few minutes (350% CPU) and then quieted down. Console still clogged with all sorts of “cannot access private account” errors from accountsd.
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Will,
that sounds like the same exact issue I was experiencing, however my issue now seems to be resolved. Did you follow the steps on this page exactly as written?
https://appuals.com/fix-mac-running-slow-due-addressbooksourcesync/
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Will, in the console app, on those “can not access private account” errors, does it reference one of the folders/files in
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Sources
For me one of these private errors was referencing a file in the ./sources directory. Once I applied the previous addressbook fix mentioned above these errors went away and mail is running normally. Hope you can fix as well.
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Will,
Others on reddit as well as on the Apple forums have applied the fix I posted successfully. I’m curious to see if your issue is resolved as well?
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I did it last night and had the same flare ups later in the evening. I tried something very late last night and it seemed better this morning. But i had to leave for work. If I see benefit tonight I’ll post it. The address book fix didn’t help.
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Thats too bad. Looks like there is more than 1 issue in play here. Id like to help figure it out. can you send me or post your console log showing errors for kernal and accountsd and mail.
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Hey there – here’s what I did. I deleted turned off all the contacts, deleted the Address Book folder and turned on contacts. No change. I then deleted my Mail directory and had it all resynch again. No chance. Finally, I moved all of my Exchange accounts to MS Outlook, leaving only the Google accounts on Mac Mail – and this *slowed* the growth of accountsd but hasn’t addressed the problem. So it’s def mail accounts. Still experimenting.
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I travel by air frequently. Ever since upgrading to Catalina, I have experience serious problems using mail while offline during a trip. Not able to open, move or delete individual messages and other general maintenance that I like to do while flying. I have been unable to find any solution. I was concerned that it may have been caused by an add-on such as Mail Butler (which I love). I followed the advise of someone above and switched the “Check for new messages” to “Manual” and on a short test it appears to have solved the problem. Has anyone else experienced this type of issue and found another solution?
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There’s all sorts of symptoms related to this issue and yet a root cause is not apparent. To get immediate relief while on a flight, open up “activity Monitor.app” (either use Command+Space bar and type the name, or to the “Applications/Utilities” folder and run it there). In the search window in the upper right, type “accountsd”. Select that process, and then in the upper left select the “X in a circle” button. Force kill the process and you’ll get some relief. I’ve been able to reduce the issue by doing the various things I’ve listed in the two blog posts I’ve made – and it’s gotten better but eventually accountsd gets so large that memory starts paging and performance goes into the toilet. Let me know if that helps. While you’re in there, before killing the process, click the “memory” tab and see how large the accountsd process is. If it’s over say two hundred MB, then that’s indeed the issue. if it’s small (< 40Mb) then it's not likely the cause of your problems. Good luck –
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Thanks. Will give it a go
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Tried everything suggested and no joy. Installed a clean copy of MacOS and it still persisted, so I erased the hard drive and started from scratch. All good now, but reinstalling everything takes so many precious hours.
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Just to update – CLEAN INSTALL OF MACOS did NOT FIX.
Sorry for the misleading info
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Finally solved today with the latest Catalina update.
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Great news if it’s true! I’ve set my mail back to checking messages automatically instead of manually (after installing the latest Catalina update) and have crossed my fingers!
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Wow I’ll look for the update. They took a crap load of logs from my computer – hopefully that helped?
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So far it’s behaving! Looking good. I’ll add my other accounts and let it run overnight! Finally…
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Well, hold that thought – I re-added all of my accounts (except for one that I need in Outlook for other reasons) – so I have both Exchange, Yahoo and Gmail accounts in MS Mail. A total of 8 accounts. Accountsd is 124.8 MB. So it’s kind of large – started out at 30mb a few hours ago. Let’s see if it settles down. Tomorrow I’ll provide an update based on its size.
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Sadly the Catalina update didn’t offer much improvement for me. I’m turning automatic checks back off…otherwise Mail gets slow after a while and the fan periodically spins up. Back to the drawing board Apple!
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So far, so good with Mail and Exchange accounts ENABLED and the 10.5.4 update. No fans anymore and no high CPU usage. Looks like my problems are currently solved. Let’s see how it goes in the next few days.
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That’s great news – my process continues to grow – we’ll see if it maxes out. I’ve moved all my 8 accounts (Google and Exchange) to Mail to brute force test it. Thank you for the update.
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Unfortunately: after a day the CPU and Fans are back again. I took my Exchange account offline and all seems to be OK again. Same behaviour as before the 10.5.4 update :-(. Shitty mess with Apple Mail and Exchange.
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BE AWARE THAT DELETING ~/Library/Mail WILL DELETE ALL OF YOUR LOCAL MAILBOXES WITH ALL OF THEIR CONTENTS!!!
I forgot that, and dropped off thousand of mails archived there. Luckily Time Machine helped…
On the other hand I can confirm, that this action did not solve the original issue.
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Ya you’re correct – it says on the step above it:
” Make a backup of Apple Mail messages if you store anything locally (like storing something On My Mac, downloading via POP3 etc).”
But I will make it more clear. I’m sorry about that. If you look at my latest post I created a script that kills accountsd every morning. So far that’s helped. Thank you for the comment.
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I have been following the problem here since the beginning and I have invested many hours to try everything. Never with a satisfying solution until the very end. Never was the problem solved properly. Now I have completely deleted my 2019 Macbook once and completely set it up again. I only restored the data manually via TimeMaschineBackup, but all other settings I made again manually. Now finally my Macbook is running as smoothly as I was used to before Catalina. Finally! Many thanks to all the suggested ways to solve the problem, even if it didn’t help me in the end. Keep up the good work!
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Honestly I’ve been thinking the same thing. Maybe the upgrade process messed things up. I’ve got a solid Time Machine backup so I might do that as well. Maybe there was something about my machine that was misconfigured and Catalina can’t handle. First I have to ship it back to Apple for them to replace that damned butterfly keyboard. Also miffed that they haven’t updated me on this case recently either. I’ll reach out to them, and if they don’t reply in the next week, I’ll do what you did – once I get my MacBook back from Apple. My wife was having a Mojave problem – very odd – a year ago. She’s on an iMac And it would suddenly forget its boot drive and the screen would clear with a drive-icon with a blinking question mark. Their resolution was to re-image the O/S (leaving the data intact) and that fixed things.
Did you literally wipe out the entire disk and reinstall the OS and restore your files from Time Machine?
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Also thank you for following my blog.
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DUDE!! 11/4/19 Update did the trick. I’m so relieved! thank you for a great effort.
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That’s great! I’m still suffering with issues but hoping .16 will handle it.
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Thank you so much, your 12/30 post with the server settings steps worked for me. This has been driving me nuts on my new 16″ MBP for months. I cannot thank you enough, Will!
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Glad to help – there’s still an overall problem that’s not been addressed yet. Thanks for reading my blog! 🙂
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I went through all these solutions and could not solve except by turning off icloud account on my imac. That is not an option for me.
Started poking around the console and it led me to the following:
Open KeyChain app.
Click KeyChain Access, the Preferences.
Click Reset my Default KeyChains.
It then asked me to logout of icloud and back in. I did this and accountsd is now tamed and not consuming 60+% of my proc.
Thanks for the diligence in keeping this issue up.
Cheers!
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Hmm! When you did that, would auth info did you use? Did that reset all of your keychain info so you had to “re-teach” iCloud Keychain all of your already-defined passwords? Because if not, I’ll try that.
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After a few minutes have passed here and it appears all it did was use my local mac account profile password to reset the password to ACCESS to the keychain. I have not had to enter new passwords, etc. When prompted the auth it asked for was my password to unlock my mac.
Hope it works for you. Never new how much those fans annoyed me.
Thanks, again.
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There is that ominous warning that says “Create new empty ‘login’ and ‘iCloud’ keychains. You will lose all items currently stored in these keychains.” but you’re saying after you selected “Reset My Default Keychains” it didn’t do that?
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I haven’t tried that yet. I’m thinking over whether I want to lose my hundreds passwords and re-enter them. Maybe there’s an export process.
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Can’t believe people have to do all these changes. Catalina just has major mail issues. Apple should just bring out a patch and fix the problem. I have done a bare metal install of Catalina and installed my mail accounts fresh. You can’t expect all end users to do all these steps to have a quiet laptop when using mail. The whole purpose of people buying a mac is so it works flawless out of the box. If I wanted to do al these steps to fix all errors caused by bad programming of the vendor, I could have just settled with a Windows device.
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Btw, I have installed Microsoft Outlook and added the same mail accounts. No more CPU spikes.. I hope that motivates Apple a bit more to work on a good and permanent solution knowing Microsoft is more capable of creating a good working mail application on Apple’s platform. (Or, it could motivate Apple to create a fix to disrupt Outlook’s performance.. who knows..)
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I have outlook installed but I always thought it was sluggish and hoggy. But ur right, it leaves the cpu alone. By me automatically killing the background mail daemon I’ve been able to use Mail while keeping the CPU down.
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That’s exactly right. This is totally unexpected. Apple is supposed to have high quality products. Very frustrating.
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It’s 2021 and I used some of your tips and had immediate positive results – thanks!
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Thanks for commenting, Carmine! Really great to hear. 🙂 I’ll keep trying to post tips as I stumble upon new things. If you feel charitable, follow my blog –
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