What Ports Does Mail Open, and Why?

Question

Mavens of Mac Mail Internals,
While trying to debug my lightly-loaded-yet-consumed-by-spinning-beach-balls 27" iMac running OS X 10.8.4...I've observed in Activity Monitor that Mail has 33 threads and 496 ports in use.
Huh?
Why would Mail possibly need so many ports open? What ports? What kind of ports?
Are all the ports Mail is using the same type of port as 25, 587, or 993...or, is Activity Monitor reporting the system's consumption of another type of port? Or...what?
And...what's typical? How many threads and ports should Mac Mail have running and open at any point in time?
Baseline: My Mail setup is provisioned for 8 GMail mailboxes, 1 Hotmail mailbox, 1 Google Apps (Mail) mailbox, and 1 company mailbox.
Objective: Trying to determine what relationship Mail has, if any, on the increasing number of spinning beach balls infecting my system.
Thanks in advance for your assistance! Much, much appreciated,
Plane Wryter

Answer 1

Ahh!
So...Is Activity Montior reporting on the number of open IPC (Inter-process Communication) ports?
Is that what's going on?
Would this explain why coreaudiod has 1,077 ports open?
If so, any idea as to why? Why does either Mail or Coreaudio need so many internal ports open?
BIG THANKS for the insight and clarification.
Best,
Plane Wryter