Mac mail slow due to 65gb of email

emailmail.app

Ive got 8 email accounts which i manage in mac mail.

The largest one of these accounts is 30GB and the others are each c. 5GB. So 65GB in total. Most of these are google apps for business accounts, and one is a private imap system.

I feel that the size of the email accounts is making the mac mail programme slow.

Is there anything i can do to make mac mail run better with these large files.

I have seen some other email clients that have a feature where you can only sync the last X years of emails to the desktop client whilst keeping the rest of the older emails on the email server, dose mac mail have something similar ?

Best Answer

Mac Mail saves the emails on the hard drive. I would try to find A mail app that doesnt save the mail to the hard drive but just sees the mail from the cloud email server.

If you use Gmail as a mail client for those emails then I recommend Mailplane. Others like Spark, CanaryMail, Mailspring and Polymail are all good alternatives along with others in the Mac App Store.

Other email clients should offer an option to store less emails offline and limit the size of your cache to a manageable size.

While there are steps to clean out the space for Mac Mail, I personally think signing out of it altogether and using an alternative might be best.

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to set up OS X Server Mail to auto-configure Mac Mail IMAP clients

I did a little digging and found out a little of what OSX tries to do to auto-configure an email account.

In system preferences when adding a mail account, OSX makes a POST to https://mac-services.apple.com/iconfig/dconf the post parameters are:

domain: EMAIL_DOMAIN_THE_USER_ENTERED.com
version: 1
capabilities: MACOSX

For a service like gmail the following is returned:

<domain>
  <name>gmail.com</name>
  <description>Gmail</description>
  <service>
    <hostname>imap.gmail.com</hostname>
    <port>993</port>
    <protocol>IMAP</protocol>
    <ssl/>
    <requires>MACOSX</requires>
    <authentication>PLAIN</authentication>
  </service>
  <service>
    <hostname>smtp.gmail.com</hostname>
    <port>587</port>
    <protocol>SMTP</protocol>
    <ssl/>
    <requires>MACOSX</requires>
    <authentication>PLAIN</authentication>
    <usernameIncludesDomain/>
  </service>
</domain>

Unfortunately, for my domain I receive the following response:

<domain>
  <name>EMAIL_DOMAIN_THE_USER_ENTERED.com</name>
  <unknown/>
</domain>

As far as I can tell after an unknown response OSX gives up and requires a user to enter the details manually. Capturing network packets I see no attempt by OSX to fallback to using SRV DNS records, or the Exchange Autodiscover.xml mechanism.

If I get a chance I will open a support ticket with apple to see how one gets added to their mac-services list.

Mac Mail – Stagger / batch download emails from gmail over imap

Assuming you are using Mail.app included with OS X, there is no built-in way within the application itself.

There are other approaches.

Lower Your Internet Speed

However, you could artificially limit the speed of your Internet connection while the initial synchronisation takes place.

You can limit your Internet connection using Apple's Network Link Conditioner. See the NSHipster article about how to get and set up this useful developer tool:

Using this approach will allow you to run Mail continuously without risking your IMAP access being limited.

Manually Enable and Disable the Account

You could add the mail account, then manually enable and disable the account as desired.

Mail.app > Mail (menu) > Preferences > Accounts > Enable Account (checkbox)

You can measure the network traffic using Activity Monitor.app's Network view; see Sent Bytes and Rcvd Bytes.

Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.app

This would allow you to watch the initial synchronisation traffic climb to a reasonable level before disabling the account.