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Huge memory leak in Mail

M

mdgm

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 2, 2010
1,665
408
There is a huge memory leak in the Mail app. Whenever I open it it uses up several GBs (over 10GB, I think) of my 16GB RAM is slow and doesn't work properly. Anyone else with this issue.
 
Mine is using 65 MB of memory. How much mail do you have stored/synced in your mailboxes?
 
10s of thousands of messages.

I hope Apple fixes this bug in 10.9.1. I would like to be able to use the Mail app again.
 
mdgm said:
10s of thousands of messages.

I hope Apple fixes this bug in 10.9.1. I would like to be able to use the Mail app again.
Click to expand...

Same for me.

From what I've heard they changed the way Mail works and it now downloads all emails for offline viewing which would mean, for guys like us who don't delete things, Mail is slow or (in my case) unresponsive.

I wonder if I let it sit for a few hours and finally get started (hopefully) and then clean out my messages if it'll help.

Personally I prefer marking things as read but keeping them in case I need them later. This doesn't seem like it will work anymore though.
 
Check your Accounts.plist file. There appears to be a bug that creates multiple entries for some accounts. My plist file was 40mb and had thousands of copies of my hotmail account. Once edited down to size, it was 25k and Mail now behaves with only 65mb taken.
 
same as me.
mine is MBA 2013 w/ 8GB but I noticed mail app occupies 5GB in memory and consumes 9% of CPU power at that time. I forced quit the app, but I should've noticed it ASAP since the battery was wasted in vain.
Also it doesn't sync with live mail recently, weird. hopeless...
 
flopticalcube said:
Check your Accounts.plist file. There appears to be a bug that creates multiple entries for some accounts. My plist file was 40mb and had thousands of copies of my hotmail account. Once edited down to size, it was 25k and Mail now behaves with only 65mb taken.
Click to expand...

Nice one. My accounts plist was 80mb and contained 33000 entries for a hotmail account that I haven't used for several years!

I haven't used Mail on my Mac since I updated to mavericks because the only way to get it running plus use my other programs was to keep running Memory Clean until mail eventually started, get the info I needed then shut Mail down again.

I wasn't sure how to easily delete all that data in the plist so I created a new plist and just copy/pasted the info that I knew had nothing to do with the hotmail accounts. It seems to have worked and mail opens in a few seconds
 
Smokebelch2010 said:
Nice one. My accounts plist was 80mb and contained 33000 entries for a hotmail account that I haven't used for several years!

I haven't used Mail on my Mac since I updated to mavericks because the only way to get it running plus use my other programs was to keep running Memory Clean until mail eventually started, get the info I needed then shut Mail down again.

I wasn't sure how to easily delete all that data in the plist so I created a new plist and just copy/pasted the info that I knew had nothing to do with the hotmail accounts. It seems to have worked and mail opens in a few seconds
Click to expand...

Theres a Mail update available in the mac app store, which I believe is supposed to include some bug fixes. Might be worth downloading to see if it puts an end to the memory leak.
 
madmacfan said:
Theres a Mail update available in the mac app store, which I believe is supposed to include some bug fixes. Might be worth downloading to see if it puts an end to the memory leak.
Click to expand...

No that didn't fix it. It was after updating and still having the problem that I tried the plist trick
 
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