“Has your Mail slowed to a crawl? Has it become so greedy for memory your system sometimes hangs while it tries to send or receive an email?” Jonny Evans writes for Apple Must. “I get this problem from time-to-time so thought I’d jot down a few different ideas that may help you fix it if you encounter it too.”
First, “delete spam messages, delete deleted messages, delete messages you don’t need to keep and make sure your Mac is up to date with current system software,” Evans writes. “Now grab a cup of tea, and let’s begin.”
Evans writes, “The first stop when you are having Mail problems is to Rebuild your Mailbox…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A little Mail maintenance can really help.
SEE ALSO:
Removing unwanted email addresses in Apple’s Mail for Mac – January 5, 2017
How to speed up Mail on your Mac – November 11, 2016
Kill email spam on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad – October 20, 2016
Two email apps to replace Apple’s Mail – August 12, 2016
the answer is simple.
switch to thunderbird.
My wife is using Thunderbird (she first started with the “Netscape Communicator” twenty years ago, then migrated to the big open-source Mozilla communicator, and when that was abandoned, I moved her to Thunderbird, since that was the extension of the same project, so the user interface was exactly the same. She refused to move to Mail, because the user interface is different and she can’t be bothered to learn the new one (“I just don’t like it!”).
Thunderbird is quite slow, compared to Mail. On the same home iMac, where she uses Thunderbird, I use Mail, and mine is noticeably faster in every single operation than Thunderbird.
Your mileage may vary.
I can’t speak to proper speed comparisons, but I have continued to occasionally use SeaMonkey Mail, a followup to Netscape, which I understand is basically Thunderbird. Same reason, I too “grew up” on Netscape Mail. I use mostly Apple Mail, but still have archives that I use SeaMonkey for, works well. Apple Mail of late crawls, retrieving alias from Contacts I think.
I’ve never had problems with Mail and my Mail stuff is HUGE.
My issue with Mail is that there’s no real Way to clear out the database of any accounts you no longer use. For example I had an account of an old job, and when I left I wasn’t able to delete the local date on my hard disk that correspond to the mail that was there. In the meantime, I’ve decided to use Spark.
Here is a good way to speed up your older Mac.
https://jmmxtech.wordpress.com/2016/10/17/how-to-get-a-new-macbook-pro-for-124/
(NOT a scam)
One of the things listed is to remove attachments. This holds even more true for your Sent messages.
1- Select Sent mailbox
2- Select All
3- menu: Message-> Remove Attachments
NOTE! You may want to guard any business emails form this, particularly if you have sent invoices. It is nice to know exactly what you have sent. You can easily do this by moving those sent emails to an appropriate mailbox for either your business or that particular client.
Doing this can clean up a tremendous amount of trash if you have been emailing for many years.
I ‘vacuum’ my Apple Mail Index every day using a utility. (MainMenu Pro is my fave). That keeps the mail clog away. But it still likes to hog my bandwidth at times, slowing down my web browser. It does, rarely, have an aneurism for reasons I can never comprehend. But generally, it’s a brave fellow and does the deed well.
No problems here. Sounds like a fluff article.
Disliked Apple Mail from the get go. I switched to Postbox many years ago, thankfully.
http://www.postbox-inc.com