[MMUG] Mail issues

[Marc Carter]

I use my MacBook Pro (2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 gig ram) heavily and
touch wood its been good to me. It will be 3 years old in November.

Generally I have, with the help of Spaces, a fair amount of apps open
at once, Mail, Safari, Word, Excel, TextEdit, Things, Skype are all
usually open, and when I need them I will open (and sometimes leave
open) Tweetie, WriteRoom, iCal, Address Book , iTunes. But nothing
massive, no photoshop or the likes of.

I will occasionally have all of the above open and the fans will kick
in and my legs warm up, usually when I am working on Word and/or Excel
docs.

Lately though the fans are on all the time, and the enclosure has been
getting so hot it is getting very uncomfotable to rest my palms on the
surface. I have spent a few days trying to resolve it, I never turn
the machine off so thought I would run Onyx and let it clean
everything up - repair permissions, weekly/monthly tasks etc. Still
hot still have the fans on overdrive.

I paid £1.20 for the iStat iPhone app so I could more easily see what
my computer was doing (neat little app by the way!), I left it open
last night while watching tv and would go in every 20 mins to open and
close apps to see if I could find any issues. As you have probably
guessed from the topic the problem is Mail.

I don't know why, and I don't know what to do about it, I have always
used Mail, its the first app I launch when I start the machine (if I
ever shut it) and it sits in a space by itself checking for messages
and serving me well. I do have 12 accounts in Mail, but I have always
had loads, I have them for various parts of my work and I am involved
with a few small support groups so need various address so I can keep
an eye on things and requests for help and support.

Running all of the above without Mail (plus a few more for good
measures) had the processors working at between 5 and 8% and the
temperatures as follows:

CPU 65°
Enclosure 36°
GPU 53°
GPU Heatsink 58°
Heatsink A 52°
Heatsink B 43°
Mem Bank A1 59°
Mem Controller 53°

Left and right fan both at around 2000rpm

Load (whatever that means) : 0.49, 0.34. 0.28

Then when it was nice and stable I clicked on Mail to open it.
Immediately the fans kicked up and notch and things got going, the CPU
temp went up to 90° but the fans cooled it all down after a couple of
mins. It takes a little time for the enclosure to warm up and I had
to go to a meeting, so i just left it alone, pretty much idle to be
honest and these are the current stats:

CPU 79°
Enclosure 46°
GPU 60°
GPU Heatsink 66°
Heatsink A 59°
Heatsink B 51°
Mem Bank A1 64°
Mem Controller 56°

The processor is working at well over 50% (it says on average 55% user
and 3% system if that means anything).

Left and right fan both at around 6000rpm

Load: 2.78, 1.86, 2.42

So a few questions. Is this dangerous for the machine? Why is it
doing it (or how do I find out), and what can I do to make it better?
Its blatantly Mail that is doing this, I can shut it and straight away
calm is restored and things cool down, but thats a pain to keep
doing. Also just to add, yesterday Mail crashed 3 times, never
crashed before.

Any suggestions appreciated, if you need any other details or numbers
I am happy to get them but please treat me like an idiot and talk me
through where to find them!

Cheers

Marc

[Dom Barnes]

Marc,

Perhaps try running Onyx and rebuilding the Mail.app indexes. Or just do what MacOSXHints.com suggests
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2006013009291731

Dom

[Marc Carter]

Just an update on this.  Turns out it wasn't just me, its an issue and Apple are aware of it, and it involves SyncServer.  To test it if you have Mail quit, open Activity Monitor and keep an eye on Sync Server, start Mail, SyncServer goes to the top briefly (either straight away or after a while) and then after a split second it goes back down the list and Mail goes to the top and runs at nearly 100% cpu usage.

It was seriously annoying, I was opening Mail, sending emails and then closing it again to save my legs from getting hot and the noise of the fans.  

The fix, temporary maybe but it works, is as follows:

Make sure Mail, Address Book and Safari are closed (write down these steps)

In Terminal type:

/System/Library/Frameworks/SyncServices.framework/Resources/resetsync.pl reset

Start Mail again.

It will then ask you if you want MobileMe to merge or overwrite your data, I had backed up so just got it to overwrite.

I'm guessing this is only an issue if you use MobileMe, it was very annoying and for now at least I'm fixed.