Mail is using 100% of CPU, fans are spinning wheee!

[DenisK]

A great deal of good wisdom here, people, i keep checking here but now it seems its my turn to ask a question:
My black MB, OSX 10.5.5: A few days ago noticed high fan noise from my dear MB, started paying attention, Activity Monitor revealed that Mail, whenever started is using 100+ of the CPU... satying that way until shut down. Overall stable, but still very unusual, i dont want to fry the thing just by using my mail.
I am using Mail for business and personal, it is seeing my entire Gmail account (IMAP) plus a business POP account. Gmail has 10K plus of uread messages, but the point is, this was not happening, behaving like this before.
What on Earth happened? Please do not suggest for me to clean my mailbox, etc., or reinstall anything, I was starting out a few month ago from a clean install... Thanks and cheers!

 

[Cromulent]

It is probably just indexing your mail. Leave it open for an hour or so while you eat dinner and it should be sorted when you come back.

 

[DenisK]

It is probably just indexing your mail. Leave it open for an hour or so while you eat dinner and it should be sorted when you come back.

Thank you! I guess I will try to just that. I will hook it up to the ethernet (faster) and leave it overnight. Hope to see it alive in the morning

 

[illegallydead]

It is probably just indexing your mail. Leave it open for an hour or so while you eat dinner and it should be sorted when you come back.

I have had this issue in the past. I do not think this is an indexing process, but rather a loop somewhere in the code somehow for some reason. What solved it for me:

1) Try leaving the message that you have "selected" when you aren't using Mail is just a plain old text mail. HTML or other fancier emails with attachments and such seemed to do it...

2) If you have POP3 accounts, try switching to IMAP if your account provider allows it. I had Google GMail POP3, switched it to IMAP, and voila, no more huge CPU usage.

What it comes down is this: it varies. Try these two things. Might work, might not. Just hope that the next update / version fixes it

 

[illegallydead]

Thank you! I guess I will try to just that. I will hook it up to the ethernet (faster) and leave it overnight. Hope to see it alive in the morning

Indexing the mail does not have to do with the internet. It has already downloaded the message, it would just be indexing the metadata in the mail so that it can efficiently search it, as well as to optimize the file or something.

Can't hurt though I suppose. good luck.