Michael, after installing Mountain Lion my computer seemed to be working okay. But today, Mail slowed to a crawl and eventually the whole computer became unusable. I used Activity Monitor to try to see what was happening and found up to 15 processes called “spamsieve-reader” running simultaneously and pegging my CPU. (see attached screen shot)
It was unbelievable. I couldn’t even force quit the processes, use the Finder to try to disable SpamSieve, or anything else. SpamSieve itself (the app) was non-responsive.
After several restarts with similar results, I finally managed to disable SpamSieve by removing the items in my User Library/Mail/Bundles and /LaunchAgents folders, then Zipping the application itself.
All in all, I lost about 3 hours of work today and needless to say do NOT want this to re-occur.
Do you know what caused this? And how to prevent it?
I’m running OS 10.8.1 on a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Dual Core machine.
Mail 6.0
SpamSieve 2.9.4
9 email accounts
I access my email from my iPhone and iPad, where I’ve had no problems.
You’ve received some e-mails with attached files that are triggering a bug in Mountain Lion’s PDF subsystem. To work around the bug, click this link. There’s some more information here.
It’s not necessary to do all that. You can disable SpamSieve simply by unchecking its rule in Apple Mail.
Really interesting, Michael. Thanks. I clicked the link and certainly hope it won’t happen anymore.
I also discovered (for the benefit of other readers on the Forum) that syncing via iCloud was making Mail itself take over my CPU (after disabling SpamSieve). I disconnected iCloud completely (all its services) in System Preferences. Then I added them back in one by one, keeping an eye on Activity Monitor to see if anything triggered this weird Mail behavior. I got everything back on except Mail syncing and it all works perfectly now.
Next I have to cautiously try re-activating iCloud’s Mail function. Fortunately, I use gmail and my own business account for just about everything so I can proceed slowly and carefully.
