Feb 3rd I get an automated email from my hosting company for my business website telling me that my bandwidth for the month has been 80% used. Feb 4th, I'm locked out of everything, cpanel, the works.
OK...a call out to support and they double my bandwidth to 1GB but what used the previous 0.5GB all up? Long story short, it was all IMAP related. In passing I did discover that there were a couple of hacking attempts using a series of login requests that have been doing the rounds since at least 2011 - basically fishing for known access points on things like Wordpress, Joomla etc. (so I blocked that IP address from accessing my site) but this had nothing to do with the bandwidth being eaten up. Instead, Feb 3rd 200GB of IMAP traffic and Feb 4th 300GB.
Long story short again, turns out that the IMAP client in Apple Mail for this account had gone berserk and was constantly syncing with the mail server at the hosting company. I had nearly 200 pages of logfiles all saying the same thing and that was what was eating up my bandwidth. The other IMAP account was fine.
So deleted the dodgy client and restarted it and checked the logfiles. Much better. Problem solved.
Then took another look at the iMac logfiles to see that Mail was going doolally trying to find long lost mail folders and generally getting it's knickers in a twist. Googled and found out how to force Mail to re-index everything (NB not rebuild - that would have been too easy).
That got fixed and the Mac seemed a bit more spritely. So what else is going on?
Hey ho....something called Keystone Agent keeps calling home. What's that all about ? Turns out that sneaky Google installs a hidden process in your Mac that keeps calling home to check for updates. Often. To often. And without your say-so. Tried all the terminal commands for telling it to stop phoning home...no affect. Tried the command to tell it never call home.....no effect.
Finally found a command called nuke :twisted:
That put it in its place
And the Mac is breezing along very nicely now, thank you very much. So next time your Mac seems to be a bit sluggish, take a peek in the system logs.
OK...a call out to support and they double my bandwidth to 1GB but what used the previous 0.5GB all up? Long story short, it was all IMAP related. In passing I did discover that there were a couple of hacking attempts using a series of login requests that have been doing the rounds since at least 2011 - basically fishing for known access points on things like Wordpress, Joomla etc. (so I blocked that IP address from accessing my site) but this had nothing to do with the bandwidth being eaten up. Instead, Feb 3rd 200GB of IMAP traffic and Feb 4th 300GB.
Long story short again, turns out that the IMAP client in Apple Mail for this account had gone berserk and was constantly syncing with the mail server at the hosting company. I had nearly 200 pages of logfiles all saying the same thing and that was what was eating up my bandwidth. The other IMAP account was fine.
So deleted the dodgy client and restarted it and checked the logfiles. Much better. Problem solved.
Then took another look at the iMac logfiles to see that Mail was going doolally trying to find long lost mail folders and generally getting it's knickers in a twist. Googled and found out how to force Mail to re-index everything (NB not rebuild - that would have been too easy).
That got fixed and the Mac seemed a bit more spritely. So what else is going on?
Hey ho....something called Keystone Agent keeps calling home. What's that all about ? Turns out that sneaky Google installs a hidden process in your Mac that keeps calling home to check for updates. Often. To often. And without your say-so. Tried all the terminal commands for telling it to stop phoning home...no affect. Tried the command to tell it never call home.....no effect.
Finally found a command called nuke :twisted:
That put it in its place And the Mac is breezing along very nicely now, thank you very much. So next time your Mac seems to be a bit sluggish, take a peek in the system logs.