3/27/2006
Speeding Up Mail.app
I previously complained about miscellaneous bugs in the new Mail.app that came with OS X 10.4.4. In some IMAP accounts I was seeing a full directory listing of my hosting account, web files, misc files, mail; everything that was in my home directory. This had been bugging me to no end. On top of that Mail was becoming increasingly slow to respond after some operations. Opening Mail Preferences sometimes took five minutes at full system load.
After trolling around Google looking for possible fixes I came across several discusssions about removing Mails index file which forces it to rebuild from scratch on the next launch. I shut down mail. Navigated over to ~/Library/Mail and moved the index file Envelope Index onto the desktop. The file was nearly 30 megabytes. When I reopened Mail, the import messages wizard ran for over 10 minutes importing the 50K odd messages available.
To my pleasant surprise, much of the inconsistencies I had been experiencing were gone. No longer was every file in my home directories listed as mail messages on some accounts. Mail.app was 100% more responsive. The Envelope Index file was now only 11 megabytes.
While trying to fix these issues previously, I had experimented with several different settings of the IMAP Prefix Setting under Advanced account settings. This no doubt, contributed to the munging of my mailboxes, with various folders named INBOX and mail floating around on some accounts.
Before performing this fix, I standardized each account with what I thought to be the correct setting for the IMAP prefix. On accounts I never had problems with, I left the prefix empty as Mail.app was apparently talking to those servers correctly. On accounts where I knew mail to be stored in the ~/mail folder, I supplied that as the prefix. On a few other accounts that were acting odd, I used INBOX as the prefix. This prefix setting is so that Mail.app can understand how to talk to the different types of IMAP servers out there. In a perfect world, they would all implement the spec properly. But in the real world? Come on.
Another setting I found that may speed up some of Mail.app’s issues is the Keep copies of messages for offline viewing also under Account -> Advanced preferences. I changed this from All messages, but omit attachments to Only messages I’ve read as indicated by several sites to help increase Mail’s performance. I’ll update on this setting later if I can tell any further performance speed up.
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