OSX mail app is slow? Make it Faster

A friend sent me this brilliant tip via twitter the other day.

OSX mail.app is a really sweet desktop mail application with built in gmail support.

After using mine for about a year, it had become kinda slow – I didn’t really notice how slow until I tried this tip:

1. Close mail.app

2. Open terminal

3. Type the following in to terminal:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

4. You should now have a sqlite prompt (sqlite>).

5. At the sqlite> prompt, type:
vacuum subjects;

6. After the prompt returns (may take a few seconds), you can Control-D to exit.

7. Restart mail – it should be noticeably faster!

cj on September 30th, 2009 at 2:11 am

Wow, this really worked wonders for me. Before I did this, it could 10-15 seconds to load a mailbox. Now its less than 1 second per mailbox.

Remains to be seen how long it will last for now.

Thanks for the tip!
OSX mail app is slow? Make it Faster : Mac Tales « mensonblog on November 19th, 2009 at 2:03 pm

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