If you start noticing that your Mac’s Mail app always downloading and is continuously or frequently showing a message that it’s “Downloading Messages,” you are not alone.
Both OSX and macOS users report this problem with their Mail app. Luckily, some fixes do the trick and get your Mac’s Mail App up and working normally with no more “downloading messages” errors.
Quick Tips
Relaunch the Mail app while holding the Shift key on your keyboard
Change your mail account’s setting for storing the Drafts Mailbox Behaviors to On My Mac
Take your Mail Account offline temporarily and then take them back online
Mail App Always Downloading: Sometimes It’s Normal!
First, if you’re observing this downloading message at the bottom left of your Mail app’s sidebar and it’s only there for a relatively short time, this is normal.
This message means your Mail app is syncing across your various email accounts.
Even though it uses the term downloading it’s actually checking for any syncing between accounts. So, the words of wisdom here are: IGNORE IT.
Mail App Always Downloading: Housekeeping
Before you troubleshooting, perform these steps. These might fix your issue, and if not, they prepare your Mail for fixing.
Prep Tips
Delete all messages inside your Deleted Items and Junk (Spam) folders
Delete any messages you no longer need from your Inbox and other mailboxes
Update to the latest version of Mail, if possible
Change Where Email Stores Your Drafts
Quite a few of our readers noted that if they changed the location of where email accounts store their drafts that the Mail App started working normally.
Change Draft Settings for Apple’s Mac Mail App
Open Mail
Go to Apple Menu > Preferences > Accounts
Select a mail account
Choose the tab Mailbox Behaviors
Change Drafts Mailbox to On My Mac and choose Drafts from the drop-down menu options
Troubleshoot Mail App Always Downloading
Reload Mail App
Quit the Mail app by select Mail > Quit Mail. Then, relaunch the Mail app while holding the Shift key on your keyboard. This action forces Mail to open without displaying any problematic messages.
Take Account Offline
But if your problem is more than just that message, you need to put your investigative skills to test. The first thing to try and rectify this situation is to take your Mail Account offline.
With your Mail App open, navigate to the Menu Bar and select Mailbox. From that drop-down menu choose to Take All Accounts Offline.
Once that completes, return to that menu and this time select Take All Accounts Online. See if that solves the problem.
Turn Off and Back On Problematic Account
If not, check and see if this problem is happening on one particular account or all of your mail accounts. If it’s only happening on one of your accounts, turn off that account and then add it back in again.
Do this by going to Mail > Accounts or Apple Menu > System Preferences > Internet Accounts.
Then from the left pane, select your problematic account and choose the minus sign.
You’ll see a message asking if you want to delete this account from all computers using iCloud Keychain (if applicable), select “Turn Off Account.”
Once the account is off, turn it back on by selecting the account, now listed as Inactive and tick the box next to Mail (and anything else you want to sync such as Contacts, Calendars, etc.)
Look at Activity Monitor
With your Mail app open, start by navigating to the Menu Bar and select Window. In the Window drop-down menu, choose Activity (or press Option+Command+0.)
Selecting Activity shows a small activity monitor that lists any messages currently downloading.
Sometimes, you MacBook pauses a large download to save energy when your MacBook is using battery power. If that’s the case, click the button in your Activity Monitor to resume downloading.
Rebuild It
If your problem wasn’t a paused download, try rebuilding and reindexing your Mailbox. It’s best first to delete any email that in your Trash and your Junk folders BEFORE you rebuild.
Rebuilding a mailbox updates the list of messages it contains. To rebuild:
Select a mailbox in the Mail sidebar
Choose Mailbox > Rebuild
Rebuilding Mailboxes takes a lot of time and once you start there is no pause or stop button, so proceed with caution.
Additionally, you must repeat these two steps for each one of your Mailboxes.
And when you rebuild mailboxes for IMAP or Exchange accounts, all the messages AND attachments stored locally on your computer are first removed and then downloaded again from your mail servers back to your Mac.
That means you’ll use a lot of your network’s bandwidth.
ALSO, your mailbox may appear empty until the download is complete–this is normal.
ReIndex Your Mail
Once you rebuild, take a look around your Mail app and mailboxes. If you are still having issues with downloading messages, Mail fails to launch, or any other problems, it’s time to try a manual reindexing.
The biggest difference between Reindexing and Rebuilding is that while rebuilding allows users to select individual mailboxes to be rebuilt, reindexing affects ALL Mailboxes.
Reindexing is indeed the nuclear option. It’s the last stop when Mail is so unresponsive that it barely works, the search function is not correctly working, or the Mail app won’t launch at all. So again, tread with care.
To ReIndex Mac Mail
Quit Mail App
On your Desktop create a folder named OLDMailData
Go to Finder
From Finder Menu Bar
Press and Hold the Shift Key (or Option Key for some Macs)
Select Go > Library
Locate the Mail Folder
Find a folder titled “V” followed by a number (V4 in my example)
Locate the MailData folder
Find any file beginning with Envelope Index and move these to your Desktop OLDMailData folder
Open the Mail app
It builds new Envelope Index files but takes a lot of time
If you have thousands or more messages, reindexing takes time–potentially hours. But this process fixes a lot of Mail App problems, including constant downloading, Mail app not working or responsive, and other message and email problems.
Once your Mail app works correctly, go ahead and delete the copies of the “Envelope Index” files from your Desktop OLDMailData folder by dumping it in the trash.
Reader Tips
Close Mail and go to User > Library > Mail to trash this file: MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded
Don’t store your email drafts on the server! Changing this to save drafts on your Mac and then restarting Mail fixed the problem for me. Go to Mail App > Preferences > Accounts > Mailbox Behaviours and change the Drafts Mailbox to On My Mac
Delete all of your email accounts from Apple Mail and then reinstall them manually one-by-one. I did this, and it worked. You must delete ALL of your MAIL ACCOUNTS–not just the ones that have problems. So yeah, this one takes time
Log into your email account’s web interface (use a browser) and clear all the draft messages there. Then relaunch your Mail app. It looks like it’s worked for my MacBook!
Not an ideal solution but deleting my email accounts from my iPhone solved the problem for me
For most of her professional life, Amanda Elizabeth (Liz for short) trained all sorts of folks on how to use media as a tool to tell their own unique stories. She knows a thing or two about teaching others and creating how-to guides!
Her clients include Edutopia, Scribe Video Center, Third Path Institute, Bracket, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Big Picture Alliance.
Elizabeth received her Master of Fine Arts degree in media making from Temple University, where she also taught undergrads as an adjunct faculty member in their department of Film and Media Arts.
Thanks for your solutions. Really appreciated as I look at 70,000 emails still loading and I have deleted thousands. Does anyone else here in 2021 get that feeling that we are dealing with the same stuff (actually a lot worse) than it was even in the 80s or 90s? Often I get the feeling that I am using a lightbulb that was never designed to work properly, when it easily could have been. The technology goes forward but it always goes back as well. Things could have been a lot different.
POP messages above ~30MB (my guess) can hang mail receipt. If you check every 5 minutes, the number of messages to be downloaded will double, triple, etc. and never download. After a day of waiting the count was something like 130,000. Actually about 1200 messages following the large one were held up. Had to go to the server and find the offending email and remove it. Then messages flowed again.
I upgraded to Catalina a couple of days after it came out.
My e-mail upgrading froze during installation (I use 2 Google mail accounts, one Apple and another third party account).
I called Apple and the issue was too new for them to help.
I went to the Apple store and they didn’t have anybody on staff that could solve it.
So I did a reinstall of my pre-Catalina Mojave back-up from my Time Capsule.
Then I found one of the Google Mail accounts constantly downloading and unresponsive – the other 3 accounts were fine.
I called Google and they tried some configuration changes, but eventually, we had to resort to forwarding e-mail from the troubled Google account to the good Google account (not an optimal long term solution).
I read this article and followed each recommendation.
The last one (Reindexing) worked!! It has saved hours of agony and low product,ivity.
I had been losing my mind trying to figure out how to solve this.
If anyone else is still having issues after removing, re-adding, deleting the index files, and re-indexing the Mac mail app and still experiencing problems TRY THIS.
I noticed my drafts were accumulating in a few of my inboxes on Gmail. I decided to delete all of my previous drafts before re-adding my mail account to populate my mail.
IT SOLVED MY PROBLEM, MAC MAIL FINALLY STOPPED DOWNLOADING THOUSANDS OF MESSAGES…..
I am not sure why this worked for me, but I noticed a discrepancy between my drafts on my Mac mail and what was actually present in my gmail account. TRY THIS!
Thanks for sharing this tip! We’ll add it into the article as you are certainly not the only one with this particular problem with Gmail and the Mail app.
I am happy to report that changing the location of the Draft did the trick for me. Below is a recount of my issue.
Bought a new 2018 iMac in Sept, latest OS and updates, and once added the user’s iCloud and Gmail it started using 75-90% of available bandwidth. At first I just assumed it was downloading the initial mailboxes, but after several weeks to couple months it was clear that this not normal. Like many have described, always downloading 5XXX of 37501 messages, day in and day out. Numbers always change but behavior stay the same. As soon as I shut down Mail the bandwidth utilization drops, once re launched Mail the same will start back up in an hour or maybe after a day; but will always come back as the top node (as can be clearly seen in my PFSense firewall stats in real time).
While investigating, I downloaded the same mailboxes into a Windows 10 / Thunderbird mail app, took overnight to complete, afterwards bandwidth never spiked again. Clearly looking at all the threads dating back to 2015 Mail is buggy. Luckily I only have one Mail user in my company and the rest all just use web Gmail.
** I followed **
Change Draft Settings for Apple’s Mac Mail App
Open Mail
Go to Apple Menu > Preferences > Accounts
Select a mail account
Choose the tab Mailbox Behaviors
Change Drafts Mailbox to On My Mac and choose Drafts from the drop-down menu options
tried all of the above. Nothing worked. Still downloading hundred thousands of emails. Have a very large 100gb gmail inbox. The search wont find any emails, the client is unusable. :(((
It would have helped to clarify how I might know whether I needed to press ‘shift’ or ‘option’. I finally tried seeing what happened when pressing ‘option’ and ‘Library’ appeared in the list.
I’ve had this same problem for ages. I have unchecked auto-check mail and set everything to manual checks, quit, restart.
The manual checkbox is still ticked, but Apple Mail still goes ahead and auto checks mail every 10 minutes or so and dings to distract me. I need my Mail app open so I can refer to information in emails – but when I’m working I don’t want to be distracted by new messages coming in.
Even the movement in the mail list attacks unwanted attention (I have Mail sounds turned off). Why can’t Apple get this simple feature fixed?
Your advice on Reindexing Mac Mail worked for me. It used to take ages before I could quit Mail because it was always ‘downloading’ something or other. Now Mail is back to its original snappy self. Thanks for the tip.
I have OS X El capitan …..I am needing to pull the messages off the server when they come in and store on my Mac..as I am changing servers and will need to keep copy of past relevant emails. Now, when I remove the email from webmail, it removes it off the computer and my other linked devices. There is NO box in advanced under preferences for this account that allows me to check off “Remove copy from server after retrieving message. thanks for your help
You need to configure your email account(s) as POP instead of IMAP. For example, if you have the Gmail account set up as an IMAP account, all your messages are deleted from the server when you delete them from your Mac. BUT, once your account is set to POP, you should see the option to remove copy from the server after retrieving a message.
Look for instructions on how to set-up a POP account with your email provider.
Hi:
Under:
ReIndex Your Mail
… It says:
“The biggest difference between Rebuilding and Rebuilding is that while rebuilding allows users to select individual mailboxes to be rebuilt, Reindex affects ALL Mailboxes.”
I think it should say:
“The biggest difference between Rebuilding and Reindexing is that ….”
Tried it on 2 different accounts that had this issue on 2 different computers. This worked for a little while but the both users told me the issue came back after a few days.
>> Even though it uses the term downloading” it’s actually checking for any syncing between accounts. So, the words of wisdom here are: IGNORE IT.
How do I ignore it? The human eye is naturally attracted to all flashing messages. It’s an extremely unwelcome feature for those of us trying to concentrate. Any advice about how to train my mind to stop noticing when the computer is asking for my attention with useless information would be super appreciated.
I did everything you suggested above all the way to built “Envelope Index” but the moment I restarted my Email, it started downloading again. When I looked at the Envelope files, they are even more – from three became five.
Has anyone ACTUALLY been able to completely fix the problem.
I now have two clients with exactly the same issue.
I’ve gone through everything thus far and nothing is a permanent solution.
The machine is actually using data traffic constantly.
if I had a choice I would just setup the account in outlook. but the client insists on using mac mail.
Thanks for your solutions. Really appreciated as I look at 70,000 emails still loading and I have deleted thousands. Does anyone else here in 2021 get that feeling that we are dealing with the same stuff (actually a lot worse) than it was even in the 80s or 90s? Often I get the feeling that I am using a lightbulb that was never designed to work properly, when it easily could have been. The technology goes forward but it always goes back as well. Things could have been a lot different.
POP messages above ~30MB (my guess) can hang mail receipt. If you check every 5 minutes, the number of messages to be downloaded will double, triple, etc. and never download. After a day of waiting the count was something like 130,000. Actually about 1200 messages following the large one were held up. Had to go to the server and find the offending email and remove it. Then messages flowed again.
This article saved my e-mails and sanity.
I upgraded to Catalina a couple of days after it came out.
My e-mail upgrading froze during installation (I use 2 Google mail accounts, one Apple and another third party account).
I called Apple and the issue was too new for them to help.
I went to the Apple store and they didn’t have anybody on staff that could solve it.
So I did a reinstall of my pre-Catalina Mojave back-up from my Time Capsule.
Then I found one of the Google Mail accounts constantly downloading and unresponsive – the other 3 accounts were fine.
I called Google and they tried some configuration changes, but eventually, we had to resort to forwarding e-mail from the troubled Google account to the good Google account (not an optimal long term solution).
I read this article and followed each recommendation.
The last one (Reindexing) worked!! It has saved hours of agony and low product,ivity.
Thank you Elizabeth!!
Hey guys…
I had been losing my mind trying to figure out how to solve this.
If anyone else is still having issues after removing, re-adding, deleting the index files, and re-indexing the Mac mail app and still experiencing problems TRY THIS.
I noticed my drafts were accumulating in a few of my inboxes on Gmail. I decided to delete all of my previous drafts before re-adding my mail account to populate my mail.
IT SOLVED MY PROBLEM, MAC MAIL FINALLY STOPPED DOWNLOADING THOUSANDS OF MESSAGES…..
I am not sure why this worked for me, but I noticed a discrepancy between my drafts on my Mac mail and what was actually present in my gmail account. TRY THIS!
Good luck!
HI Sean,
Thanks for sharing this tip! We’ll add it into the article as you are certainly not the only one with this particular problem with Gmail and the Mail app.
We appreciate you paying it forward!
Liz
hi there
This worked for me. My Apple Mail was working fine for years, all of a sudden it kept on downloading deleted messages again and again…
Close Mail and go to User > Library > Mail to trash this file: MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded3
Cheers
Hi there,
Same problem on my MacBook Pro 2017 OS 10.14.2.
I did the Draft thing and it worked…for a month.
The issue is back and even worse, never stopping.
I installed Bandwidth+ in order to watch the activity and it’s effectively downloading 20Go to 40Go every day.
Reindexing and Rebuilding is so time-consuming I didn’t retry for the X time.
Ended by using Outlook but not satisfied either and would really come back to Mail.app if somebody (Apple programmers???) find a solution.
I am happy to report that changing the location of the Draft did the trick for me. Below is a recount of my issue.
Bought a new 2018 iMac in Sept, latest OS and updates, and once added the user’s iCloud and Gmail it started using 75-90% of available bandwidth. At first I just assumed it was downloading the initial mailboxes, but after several weeks to couple months it was clear that this not normal. Like many have described, always downloading 5XXX of 37501 messages, day in and day out. Numbers always change but behavior stay the same. As soon as I shut down Mail the bandwidth utilization drops, once re launched Mail the same will start back up in an hour or maybe after a day; but will always come back as the top node (as can be clearly seen in my PFSense firewall stats in real time).
While investigating, I downloaded the same mailboxes into a Windows 10 / Thunderbird mail app, took overnight to complete, afterwards bandwidth never spiked again. Clearly looking at all the threads dating back to 2015 Mail is buggy. Luckily I only have one Mail user in my company and the rest all just use web Gmail.
** I followed **
Change Draft Settings for Apple’s Mac Mail App
Open Mail
Go to Apple Menu > Preferences > Accounts
Select a mail account
Choose the tab Mailbox Behaviors
Change Drafts Mailbox to On My Mac and choose Drafts from the drop-down menu options
Hi,
tried all of the above. Nothing worked. Still downloading hundred thousands of emails. Have a very large 100gb gmail inbox. The search wont find any emails, the client is unusable. :(((
It would have helped to clarify how I might know whether I needed to press ‘shift’ or ‘option’. I finally tried seeing what happened when pressing ‘option’ and ‘Library’ appeared in the list.
Still have the same problem:
Mail.app Preferences has “Check for new messages:” set to “Manually” and … STILL … Mail.app checks for messages AUTOMATICALLY every hour or so.
What’s up?
Hi Brian,
Try restarting your Mac, then check those preferences again to ensure they “stuck.”
I’ve had this same problem for ages. I have unchecked auto-check mail and set everything to manual checks, quit, restart.
The manual checkbox is still ticked, but Apple Mail still goes ahead and auto checks mail every 10 minutes or so and dings to distract me. I need my Mail app open so I can refer to information in emails – but when I’m working I don’t want to be distracted by new messages coming in.
Even the movement in the mail list attacks unwanted attention (I have Mail sounds turned off). Why can’t Apple get this simple feature fixed?
Hi Brian,
Yes, this has been a common Mac user complaint starting with El Capitan through current macOS version.
Please consider leaving Apple your feedback. It’s something they do read and consider when designing updates.
Sam
Your advice on Reindexing Mac Mail worked for me. It used to take ages before I could quit Mail because it was always ‘downloading’ something or other. Now Mail is back to its original snappy self. Thanks for the tip.
I have OS X El capitan …..I am needing to pull the messages off the server when they come in and store on my Mac..as I am changing servers and will need to keep copy of past relevant emails. Now, when I remove the email from webmail, it removes it off the computer and my other linked devices. There is NO box in advanced under preferences for this account that allows me to check off “Remove copy from server after retrieving message. thanks for your help
Hi Lorna,
You need to configure your email account(s) as POP instead of IMAP. For example, if you have the Gmail account set up as an IMAP account, all your messages are deleted from the server when you delete them from your Mac. BUT, once your account is set to POP, you should see the option to remove copy from the server after retrieving a message.
Look for instructions on how to set-up a POP account with your email provider.
Hope that helps!
SK
Hi:
Under:
ReIndex Your Mail
… It says:
“The biggest difference between Rebuilding and Rebuilding is that while rebuilding allows users to select individual mailboxes to be rebuilt, Reindex affects ALL Mailboxes.”
I think it should say:
“The biggest difference between Rebuilding and Reindexing is that ….”
Hi Peter,
Yup, you got it! Thanks for the catch, appreciate the heads up. We’ll update the article!
Thanks again for letting us know,
Liz
Tried it on 2 different accounts that had this issue on 2 different computers. This worked for a little while but the both users told me the issue came back after a few days.
>> Even though it uses the term downloading” it’s actually checking for any syncing between accounts. So, the words of wisdom here are: IGNORE IT.
How do I ignore it? The human eye is naturally attracted to all flashing messages. It’s an extremely unwelcome feature for those of us trying to concentrate. Any advice about how to train my mind to stop noticing when the computer is asking for my attention with useless information would be super appreciated.
Greetings,
I did everything you suggested above all the way to built “Envelope Index” but the moment I restarted my Email, it started downloading again. When I looked at the Envelope files, they are even more – from three became five.
Thanks,
george
Has anyone ACTUALLY been able to completely fix the problem.
I now have two clients with exactly the same issue.
I’ve gone through everything thus far and nothing is a permanent solution.
The machine is actually using data traffic constantly.
if I had a choice I would just setup the account in outlook. but the client insists on using mac mail.
I’m pretty sure there’s no solution to this. Tried all the above and more.
Time to download a new email client.
Very bad, Apple