Change Mail's sort order to remove folder opening delay

Dec 23, '04 08:21:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I've been using Mail.app for almost a year, since I got my first Mac. I've always complained that Mail.app, with my tons of folders (each with at least 6,000 messages) each terribly was slow when opening folders: in fact, I noticed a flickering of the messages for two or three seconds. I could not believe it -- click on a folder, wait for messages to sort, and then, after many seconds, read. I hated that. Eudora didn't do this.

Yesterday, the surprise: by accident, I sorted one huge folder by date from newest to oldest (that is, the opposite direction that Mail.app defaults to), and Mail.app suddenly started opening these folders in a blink of an eye!

[robg adds: I don't have any mail folders with that many messages; I do have a few with 2,000+ messages, and I haven't noticed any delays in opening the folders. I suspect the issue here might be resolved by rebuilding the indexes for the mailboxes in question -- but since this was an anonymous submission without contact info (please help me out by including an email address even if you're contributing anonymously!), I can't discuss it with the author. But if anyone out there is running Mail with similarly large collections of messages, please confirm or rebut this hint...]

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