Lion Mail is super slow

I'm in the same situation. Mail frequently pauses for 5-10 seconds while I'm typing and then suddenly catches up with me. It's super annoying. I'm on a 2.13Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbook Air.

I'm seeing the same thing. At first I just assumed it was because a lot of indexing was happening after I updated to Lion, but that was well over a week ago and I'm still seeing this. Even on very simple messages in my inbox, when I click on it to view, it takes several seconds to appear. I'm using IMAP and am on a Mac Pro tower with 8 GB of RAM. I never had this issue until updating to Lion. Anyone find any fixes for this?

OK, I found a solution that fixed the problem for me. After upgrading to Lion, not only was my email slower, but so was everything in general, and it seemed to be like Lion was having a hard time finding files on the hard drive. I found this thread, which solved the problem for me: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3197249

I followed the directions as outlined about 10 posts down, from user APierce24, and since then, things are back up to speed.

Done this a number of times, and although performance is improved, I still have laggy performance in mail.

I've also now done the full "repair" twice (what I thought worked in my earlier post), but the slowness always returns. I even used AppZapper and GrandPerspective (two great apps) to take the free space on my hard drive from 10% to over 50%, but mail and opening up some apps, such as TextEdit, are still very slow. I wonder if it has something to do with how Lion now stores versions of files? It's definately hard drive related, either an indexing thing, or file retreval problem of some sort. I sure hope Apple is looking into a fix. I'm regretting having updated to Lion at this point.

I also tried the fix but the magic rainbow appears again after a while. Anyone find a fix?

I'm also having this problem on my Macbook Air (but not on a mini). Mail is almost unusuable on my Air with extremely delayed scrolling and keyboard input. Can't believe Apple isn't addressing this.

I am having this problem as well. My iMac is a 3.1 GHz i5 and I have 16 GB(!) of RAM and Mail is absolutely unusable. C'mom Apple, this needs to be addressed!

I got this fix from another thread and it worked beautifully for me

1. Made sure that mobileme was not syncing anymore (system preferences)by logging out of MobileMe.

2. As a precaution, backed up my address book (1700 contacts) locally, and quit address book.

3. Checked to see if icloud had all of my contacts. www.icloud.com

4. Made sure that AddressBookSync was not running in Activity monitor. If it is, kill it.

5. Went into my users library (~/Library/Application Support/Address Book/) trashed everything EXCEPT Confguration.plist.

6. Went back into System preferences/icloud and made sure that Contacts was checked off. Once checked the sync started.

Just saw the fix in another forum and it worked for me! Browse to the Mail program in Finder, and click to highlight. Use CMD + i to open the info window, choose run in 32 bit mode. Problem solved! (For me, anyway. Let me know if it works for you).

This fix also seemed to work for me. So much faster! Thanks!

Can only agree. Lion Mail is currently a terrible app. Constantly experincing a spinning wheel

Even in 32bit mode it eveually slowed down to a crawl. I just installed Sparrow Mail - life changing! So much faster, especially if you use it as a client to gmail or google apps.

Great suggestion. Which I followed

Things are faster in general, but Lion Mail is still quite slow

I switched to 32 bit and it is marginally better. It's still very slow when trying to flip through messages quickly.