Mail essentially unusable after upgrade to Catalina

[sbchasin]

After the upgrade to Catalina, mail has become essentially unusable (2013 Mac Pro). Symptoms include extremely slow switching among different mailboxes. Extremely slow opening of emails and loading of same. 12 different email accounts, 2 exchange and the rest google. One of the things that i noticed is that both accountsd and mail have VERY high CPU usage, both hovering above 300%.

What I have done to try to fix:

Re-install Catalina
Deleted all email accounts and recreated.
Deleted Mail preferences / accounts preferences / related preferences
Disabled contacts syncing
Disabled calendar syncing
Reboot in safe mode

Nothing has fixed the issue. Mail usually ends up crashing inside of 24 hours. accountsd crashes about 50% of the time

A similar thing happened in the early Catalina Betas on my 2018 Mac Book Pro, but seemed fixed in the mid beta cycle.

Any ideas would be great!!

 

[Lee_Bo]

Very strange. I have both a 2016 MBP and a 2018 Mac Mini and both are running Catalina with no problems. Both are i7 processors and 16 gigs of ram.

When you reinstalled did you set up as new or restore from backup?

 

[sbchasin]

New

 

[Just_Me_D]

Very strange. I have both a 2016 MBP and a 2018 Mac Mini and both are running Catalina with no problems. Both are i7 processors and 16 gigs of ram.

When you reinstalled did you set up as new or restore from backup?

Yeah, same here on my 2017 MBP and I’m on beta build year round. Are the email accounts set to fetch, and if so, is it fetching “all” of your email and downloading them onto your Mac?

 

[sbchasin]

Just gets new mail

 

[Rob Phillips]

It baffles me that so many still use the stock Mail app. I’m not coming down on those who do, but there are a bunch of way better mail apps available through third parties.
That being said, It seems that Mail in iOS 13, iPadOS 13 and Catalina is riddled with bugs (according to countless reports I’m seeing here and elsewhere) and Apple needs to address this.

 

[taz323]

It baffles me that so many still use the stock Mail app. I’m not coming down on those who do, but there are a bunch of way better mail apps available through third parties.
That being said, It seems that Mail in iOS 13, iPadOS 13 and Catalina is riddled with bugs (according to countless reports I’m seeing here and elsewhere) and Apple needs to address this.

I've always used the stock mail app, And as of yet to see an issue. For me will prefer stock over third party.

 

[sbchasin]

It baffles me that so many still use the stock Mail app. I’m not coming down on those who do, but there are a bunch of way better mail apps available through third parties.
That being said, It seems that Mail in iOS 13, iPadOS 13 and Catalina is riddled with bugs (according to countless reports I’m seeing here and elsewhere) and Apple needs to address this.

I have tried most of the third party email programs. I always end up coming back to mail, cause it works as I want it to. I do have postbox as my back up program. I am hoping that Apple will be able to fix the issue in the next update. It was fixed on my laptop which runs the most recent beta (Had the same issue in the early betas, but it was fixed in one of the mid betas, so I am surprised it reared again in the released version). The problem I am having is on my desktop which runs the released version.

 

[Rob Phillips]

I've always used the stock mail app, And as of yet to see an issue. For me will prefer stock over third party.

I generally prefer stock over third party but e-mail is an exception. Honestly, my biggest grief with the stock Mail app is lack of Gmail push notifications. Aside from that there aren’t any major sticking points with the stock app. It’s worked just fine the times I’ve used it.

 

[Lee_Bo]

Honestly, my biggest grief with the stock Mail app is lack of Gmail push notifications.

Is that on the side of Apple or Google? Maybe Google isn’t allowing the Mail app to use Push.

 

[Rob Phillips]

Is that on the side of Apple or Google? Maybe Google isn’t allowing the Mail app to use Push.

Google. Used to work a long time ago but they cut it off.

 

[ocradicic]

Having problems with install of Catalina update also, Mac Pro 2013 vintage lost complete Office software package... systems want me to purchase a new one or purchase Office 365. Didn't have a Mohave backup so still determining what to do.
OC

 

[sbchasin]

Update to 10.15.1 did not fix

 

[doogald]

After the upgrade to Catalina, mail has become essentially unusable (2013 Mac Pro). Symptoms include extremely slow switching among different mailboxes. Extremely slow opening of emails and loading of same. 12 different email accounts, 2 exchange and the rest google. One of the things that i noticed is that both accountsd and mail have VERY high CPU usage, both hovering above 300%.

What I have done to try to fix:

Re-install Catalina
Deleted all email accounts and recreated.
Deleted Mail preferences / accounts preferences / related preferences
Disabled contacts syncing
Disabled calendar syncing
Reboot in safe mode

Nothing has fixed the issue. Mail usually ends up crashing inside of 24 hours. accountsd crashes about 50% of the time

A similar thing happened in the early Catalina Betas on my 2018 Mac Book Pro, but seemed fixed in the mid beta cycle.

Any ideas would be great!!

So, what I would try to see if I could nail down the issue is to disable mail sync for accounts one by one to see if one account (or one type of account, such as exchange accounts or google/gmail accounts) stops the problems from happening. If, say, disabling all google accounts means that mail starts being stable, you could use Postbox for those accounts and Mail.app for the others, until Apple fixes this. Or, vice versa.

 

[Annie_M]

I've always used the stock mail app, And as of yet to see an issue. For me will prefer stock over third party.

The same goes for me!

 

[bakron1]

I've always used the stock mail app, And as of yet to see an issue. For me will prefer stock over third party.

Same here, I have had some issues with the sync being slow, but I still prefer the stock mail app over third party apps including the gmail app. I have used the mail app for several years now and I know they will have a fix in a future update.

 

[sbchasin]

So, what I would try to see if I could nail down the issue is to disable mail sync for accounts one by one to see if one account (or one type of account, such as exchange accounts or google/gmail accounts) stops the problems from happening. If, say, disabling all google accounts means that mail starts being stable, you could use Postbox for those accounts and Mail.app for the others, until Apple fixes this. Or, vice versa.

It appears to be an issue with Gmail and to a lesser extent, Exchange/Office365. Combination of Apple Mail, accountsd, Gmail/Exchange/Office365

All of my email accounts are one of those...

 

[Lee_Bo]

Ok, so after some Office 365 email issues, I have seen first hand some of what's going on here.

Long complicated story short, I've moved to iCloud email for everything. While the stock mail app works ok on MacOS, it is painfully slow on iOS. For example, if I swipe down and let go in the mail app on iOS, it takes forever to check for new email. Doing the same on, say Spark mail, returns an almost immediate result. Even though I have email set up to push, if I manually check on iOS' mail app, it takes a good 10 seconds to finish, LTE or wifi. Almost immediate return on Spark, LTE or wifi.

Anyone else seeing this? iOS 13.3 on iPhone 11 Pro Max, and MacOS 10.15.2 on Mac Mini 2018.