Speeding up a sluggish Mail.app - significantly.
Published by on March 17th, 2007
Troubles with Mail.app today - lists of mailbox contents were simply not displaying and in recent days the app was hanging trying to organise and list messages - sent me on a quest. I found this little gem to fiddle in Terminal for a few mins which ends up not only noticeably speeding up mail but also in some cases significantly reducing mailbox sizes, particularly with IMAP mailboxes.
1. Quit Mail.
2. Open Terminal.
3. Type the following:
cd ~/Library/Mail
sqlite3 Envelope\ IndexAn sqlite> prompt will appear.
At that prompt, type vacuum subjects;.
After a short delay, the prompt will return. Type Control-D to exit.
4. Restart Mail and enjoy the extra speed.
If you want to read up on this before just trying it, here’s the link:
Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » A faster way to speed up Mail.app
3 Responses to “Speeding up a sluggish Mail.app - significantly.”
I just tried this. I got a small size reduction: 28Mb -> 24Mb is not a great improvement but I use IMAP for one account and POP3 for two others - I don’t know if that would have made a difference…
Seems that one type of account produces less of a reduction than the other - not sure which is which ;).
I didn’t actually measure my size reduction, but the overal increase in responsiveness of Mail is very satisfying.
Perfect - I knew I’d have a use for this eventually.