A possible fix for a slow Mail.app
Feb 06, '06 05:43:00AM • Contributed by: robophilosopher
If Mail.app is running slowly for you (time for searches, time for loading Smart Mailboxes, time between clicking on a mailbox and having its index displayed), you may have ghost messages from old accounts in your message index. I worked a summer internship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and connected to their Exchange servers with Mail.app during that time. Mail was running slowly, but I didn't really notice so much; it quickly became a way of life. After leaving NIH, I deleted the Exchange server from my accounts, and Mail continued to run slowly. Just recently, I created a Smart Mailbox to search for all unread messages. It returned a huge number of messages that had been on shared folders on the NIH Exchange server. It urns out that deleting that account hadn't done much for the index of messages stored in a file named Envelope Index, which you'll find in your user's Library/Mail folder.
That file was about 200 MB. I thought "what the heck," closed Mail, moved that file to myDesktop, and restarted Mail. Mail then went through its "importing messages" routine (re-creating that file). After it finished, I found that the file is now down to about 2MB, Mail.app runs like a breeze, and all of my messages are intact. If you have problems with Mail.app's performance and you've been adding/deleting accounts, it might be worth the couple of minutes to re-generate that index.
[robg adds: I tested this on my 25.9MB index file. After reimporting, the index dropped to 4.5MB. About the only downside I had was that my 'all unread messages' Smart Mailbox then showed 600+ unread messages, all of them old. I simply marked them all read, and everything was back to normal. I did, however, make a fresh backup of the entire Mail folder prior to trying this, just in case something went wrong.]
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