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com.apple.MailServiceAgent taking up gigs of RAM

R

RoboCop001

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Oct 4, 2005
1,576
454
Toronto, Canada
Hi everyone,

Noticing something really odd. There's a process called "com.apple.MailServiceAgent" and it seems to be taking up gigs of RAM. It starts off small (I've force-quitted it) at around a couple hundred MBs. Looks normal. But then it steadily increases. 10 seconds later, it's at 2 GB and rising.

And Mail isn't even open. That's another story. Every time I launch Mail, it says "To use the new features in Mail, all your messages must be downloaded."

I click "Continue" and then it begins taking up lots of CPU, as does com.apple.MailServiceAgent.

Then I get a "Low system memory" alert, and apps start getting "paused" - I can resume them but they just pause again. After I force quit Mail and com.apple.MailServiceAgent, everything is fine.

Any ideas?

I'm going to let it run for a while, maybe it's just taking forever to download the emails. But I don't understand why it's taking up so much RAM, or why it's freezing up other apps. Also, it's annoying that it has to download the emails in the first place.
 
I've had the same thing but with com.apple.Iconsevicesagent. It took 1 GB of RAM. I tried restoring permissions and now it takes 250-300 MB.

Super weird, a lot of people are having similar problem which are being discussed on Apple's forums right now. Let's see what comes out of it I guess.
 
Just checked out the Apple forums and tried one of the suggested solutions with no luck (deleting the Mail accounts folders).

And now I can't even Screen Share to my Mac because of the stupid MailServiceAgent process! It's taken up all the RAM, making all other apps freeze, including the screen sharing process. The other culprit that's usually around is InternetAccouts or something of the sort.

This is messed up. I hope it's not at 100% CPU, that would be really bad because I won't be home for several hours. Ugh.

Maybe I should reinstall Mavericks?
 
Last edited:
Mine is using 4.2 MB so it's definitely not normal.

Is it a web mail with tons of e-mails lying around on the server?
Maybe you could log on to the web version and try and do some cleaning before Mail.app has to fetch everything, so it doesn't take so long.
 
RoboCop001 said:
Hi everyone,

Noticing something really odd. There's a process called "com.apple.MailServiceAgent" and it seems to be taking up gigs of RAM. It starts off small (I've force-quitted it) at around a couple hundred MBs. Looks normal. But then it steadily increases. 10 seconds later, it's at 2 GB and rising.

And Mail isn't even open. That's another story. Every time I launch Mail, it says "To use the new features in Mail, all your messages must be downloaded."

I click "Continue" and then it begins taking up lots of CPU, as does com.apple.MailServiceAgent.

Then I get a "Low system memory" alert, and apps start getting "paused" - I can resume them but they just pause again. After I force quit Mail and com.apple.MailServiceAgent, everything is fine.

Any ideas?

I'm going to let it run for a while, maybe it's just taking forever to download the emails. But I don't understand why it's taking up so much RAM, or why it's freezing up other apps. Also, it's annoying that it has to download the emails in the first place.
Click to expand...

This seems to be one of the few major bugs in Mavericks - in fact, this mainly happens after the upgrade with Mail and its associate processes .mailserviceagent and .internetaccounts. They normally take up huge amounts of CPU and RAM and cause Mail to hang often, especially when looking for mail.

The solution to this issue?

I've deleted everything in the ~/Library/Mail folder, including mail accounts and folders (after backing folders up, of course), and then inserted them one by one again. No further issues or hangs reported and CPU load is back to normal.

Do this at your own risk, of course - you may check Apple Support forums for more details.
 
BRLawyer said:
This seems to be one of the few major bugs in Mavericks - in fact, this mainly happens after the upgrade with Mail and its associate processes .mailserviceagent and .internetaccounts. They normally take up huge amounts of CPU and RAM and cause Mail to hang often, especially when looking for mail.

The solution to this issue?

I've deleted everything in the ~/Library/Mail folder, including mail accounts and folders (after backing folders up, of course), and then inserted them one by one again. No further issues or hangs reported and CPU load is back to normal.

Do this at your own risk, of course - you may check Apple Support forums for more details.
Click to expand...

I'm going to try doing this. I tried just deleting specific items in that folder, but this time I'll dump the entire Mail folder. I've got it backed up with Time Machine, and the Mail accounts are all IMAP anyway so it doesn't really matter.

Hopefully this works.

I'll update here later on with results.
 
I had an issue with my Accounts.plist file in ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData. It was 40MB in size. When I edited it I noticed that one of my hotmail accounts had thousands of entries. I shut down mail and deleted the duplicate entries and the resulting file was down to 25K. Both Mail and com.apple.internetaccounts are now behaving themselves.
 
I just deleted the entire Mail folder and it looks like things are back to normal.
All my emails from my accounts downloaded just fine, and everything is good! So far, anyway haha.
 
I have a solution for you all. The glitch is that Mavericks, somewhere during the install, created excessive redundant entries in your Accounts plist. You need to remove the plist at ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Accouts.plist, then reboot, and re-add your mail accounts. Spent HOURS on this for my friend. Good luck to you all, hope I could help.
 
BRLawyer said:
I am glad it helped - you're welcome.
Click to expand...

Yeah I would have not liked having to reinstall the OS, haven't done that in years! haha. Thanks.

Another thing I'm noticing with Screen Sharing is that notification centre behaves as if the screen is locked. I suppose technically it is, because when I screen share I login as a different user in a virtual display. This leaves the currently logged in user able to still use the computer, which naturally eventually will lock the screen without any use. I do this so that the display doesn't light up when I screen share.

But yeah, it's annoying. I can't click on the notifications. They just stay there in their slightly ghosted state and never go away until I log in directly when I get home. Weird. Hopefully they fix that soon. This didn't happen with Mountain Lion.
 
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