Mail taking CPU hostage and rising temp.

[Canticleer]

Hi,

I've posted this problem in other places with no results. So forgive me for trying here too.

Since more than week my MacBook Pro, running Mac OS X 10.5.8 shows strange temperature behavior.

As soon as I open Mail, the temperature of my MacBook Pro rises (with as much as 25 to 30 degrees celsius) up to 85° and more, and the fan activates. When I close down Mail the temperature falls back to normal (+/- 55° C) and the fan shuts down. This all happens within seconds.

I have SMS Fan Control and iStat running on the MacBook Pro, so I can see the actual temperature.

When I open the Activity Monitor I see that Mail uses around 99% of the CPU when it's sitting idle and when it's checking for new messages it uses up to 110% of the CPU. In Console I don't see anything concerning Mail.

This is a new behavior. I have owned and used the MacBook Pro for almost 3 years now and I used to run Mail in the background permanently without any problem until last week.

When I create a new user account on the MacBook Pro and open Mail, the problem does not occur. In the Activity Monitor I see that mail takes 0,0% of the CPU when sitting idle and around 25% when it's downloading new mails.

Things I've tried...
Repairing disk
Repairing disk permission
Rebuilding every single folder in Mail
Deleting (moving away) ~/library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
Deleting (moving away) ~/library/Cache/com.apple.mail
Deleting (moving away) ~/library/Mail
Deleting (moving away) ~/library/Mail-downloads
Running the Onyx cleaning cache program
... all with no result.

Does anyone have an idea what causes this behavior and how I can fix it?

Thanks a lot,
Ivan

 

[midijeep]

I had the same problem and it didn't get resolved until I went to 10.6. Just a suggestion--- maybe reinstall the 10.5.8 update by getting the standalone version from the apple support download page.

 

[Canticleer]

Thanks for your reply midijeep. I downloaded the standalone 10.5.8 update and reinstalled it. To no effect I'm sorry to say.

In the meantime someone named Steko on the Apple Discussions Forum gave me the advice to open iSync, open Preferences and click on Reset Sync History. To my relieve this completely did the trick. After that Mail uses around 30% of CPU when downloading new messages and 0,0% when sitting idle. This had no effect on the temperature whatsoever.

I'm glad this one's solved.