I have a relatively new MacBook Air, and it seems like I ever since I bought it my Mail periodically gets stuck on “Downloading Messages,” climbing into the thousands (I've seen numbers from ~1,200 up to 6,500+), recurring every few days to weeks with no clear trigger.
New/unread mail is also slow to load, sometimes 10-15+ seconds to open a message. I have about 8 email accounts connected to my inbox, but only 3 of them really ever get used. The issue has persisted even after updating to 27.2.
Here's a list of everything I've tried, to no avail.
- Rebuilt the affected mailbox (Mailbox menu, Rebuild)
- Quit and relaunched Mail multiple times, including after each change below
- Cleaned out Drafts folders across all accounts (reduced the stuck count meaningfully but didn’t stop recurrence)
- Toggled iCloud “Sync this Mac” off and on
- Fully disabled iCloud Mail syncing at the system level (I never send mail with my iCloud account, but I read this could help)
In doing more research, it seems like this might be an Apple software issue and nothing endemic to my Mail set-up. I don't know this to be 100% true though.
But I'm sick and tired of this and really hope someone out there can help me out!!