My Mail.app program is ridiculously slow. I have several email accounts and I just checked the size of my Mail folder (~/Library/Mail
): 593.2MB.
That's huge…no wonder it's so slow. So the question is, how do I minimize the size? I refer back to old emails all the time, so I am reluctant to just purge my email folder. I have thousands of emails.
Is there an easy way to make this smaller and will that help with the speed of this program?
I have a MacBook Pro 2.5G GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM. I am running Lion 10.7.2.
Best Answer
You might try the following:
Quit Mail first
Run the following command in Terminal:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Envelope\ Index vacuum;
This will rebuild your Mail index data.
Below is the actual shell script that I use. I keep it in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail so it is accessible from the AppleScript menu in Mail.app
When run it will automatically quit Mail. Run the command to rebuild and check the integrity of your Mail index data, restart Mail and present a dialog box showing you the before and after sizes of your Mail index file.